Geography matters in government. It keeps mattering after the geography has changed, and government has became habitual, ignoring how changes in transportation – both methods and terrain – have made past decisions and methods counterproductive.
Let me start in my backyard. Trego, School District 53, was created in 1904, when it was still part of Flathead County. Just before he left the Great Northern to develop the route for the Panama Canal, John Frank Stevens had located the Point of Rocks – a small area along the Stillwater River where they could lay railroad tracks and bring the rails through the Kootenai Valley – an area that was primarily accessible through Canada. School District 53 existed at the beginning of the boom town phase that built Trego.
That early school board created an approach to education that lasted them for about fifty years – building a school where it was needed. Between 1904 and 1960, School District 53 included Stryker School, Swamp Creek School, Edna Creek School and Trego School. Around 1960, the district dropped to a single school. The map hadn’t changed, but improved gravel roads had made transporting students a practical option. Additionally, the cost of setting up a one-room school had increased substantially, as electricity became available in 1948, making the expectation of electric lights and running water normal for a school. (Trego school kept it’s outhouses until the mid-sixties, just in case.) The geography of a remote area, where it was cheaper to build and staff a one-room school than to gravel the roads developed a unique approach to schools.
On the other hand, the West Kootenai now operates with no public schools. It wasn’t always so – when Tooley Lake school consolidated with Rexford, it was a relatively short trip down the hill, across the bridge, and into the school at old Rexford. (Rexford is the only town in the county that has moved three times) It made sense – there was a relatively brief bus ride to a larger school.
In the West Kootenai geography and demographics changed. With Libby Dam and Koocanusa Reservoir, the bridge moved south – and then Rexford school merged with Eureka, to turn a short bus ride into a 25 mile or more each way commute to school. The West Kootenai now has a large Anabaptist (Amish) community. While many Montana counties are accustomed to providing pubic schools to Hutterite communities, Lincoln County does not have such a tradition – which means that inertia keeps public school service to the West Kootenai just as consolidation left it over a half-century ago. No condemnations – just that Eureka’s school board and teachers both have limited experience with providing public schools to Anabaptist communities. (To be completely fair, Lincoln County went through a long time of delegating the County School Superintendent duties to the County Treasurer. ) There has been no motivation to change the West Kootenai public school situation to reflect the changed geography and demography.
Lincoln County was set up in 1909 so that most of the communities (excepting Yaak and Sylvanite) would be connected by the railroad, and all would be in the Kootenai drainage. Libby Dam, and the (second) railroad relocation around 1970 eliminated the railroad relocation and almost all of the Kootenai River towns. The geography had changed. Perhaps that was when the county commissioners should have realized that Lincoln County had been gutshot, and the changed geography meant the county could no longer function as planned. Perhaps, had they realized the problems that the changed geography brought, it might have been a good time to split into a pair of smaller counties. People tend to fixate on the boundary lines on a map – and the map is not the territory.
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