Hallock Family History & Genealogy

Story about Cloa HALLOCK
By Evelyn Ruth Duncan Shockey
25 June 2001, submitted by grand-daughter Michele L. (Waples) Mesenbrink


This was a long time ago when people were coming out to Kansas to settle. This young woman, her name was HALLOCK and she had trained or studied to be a school teacher. She wanted desperately to teach school. She came out from Illinois, I think, with her parents in a covered wagon. She carried her bunch of little books. She had some paper and some treasured slates and a couple of bibles and 2 or 3 other books. She felt very rich because she did have some books. She wanted to teach school. After they got settled in their little home, she asked her mother, how would she get to school. Her mother said, you might pray about it. So she prayed desperately for a school to teach. So she could be the teacher. And her mother said one day, I think you are praying wrong. I think you should pray for pupils to come to you so you could teach them.
In the meantime, her father had gotten together with the neighbors and they went across the valley to where there was an outcropping of limestone rock on the hillside. This rock when it was first uncovered it was very soft and malable and could be cut with a saw into building blocks. She woke up one morning and she heard axes and saws and things going on. She went outdoors. She could see across the valley. She could see a group of men working on the hillside. She couldn’t think what was going on.
And then after a little bit there was a hammering on the cabin door. There was a bunch of kids standing there. One child says, “teacher we come to go to school.” The other one said, “we didn’t have many books, only a Bible. We brang the Bible. Mama said we had to take care of it because it all the world’s wisdom in it. It’s a wise book. We got to take care of it.” And another little girl said, “I brought a piece of corn cone and Mama wrapped it up in a piece of cloth for me so it would stay nice for my lunch.” Well she was flabbergasted but here came the kids wanting to go to school. So she and her mother brought them inside and they arranged places for them to sit around the stove; a box of wooden chunks and anything they could drag in for them to sit on. She was very happy she started her little school. That evening she and her mom worked on the attic and they got it fixed up so they could use it for a schoolroom. It was fairly warm because the fireplace went up through the attic. And then she found out that her dad and the neighbors had gotten together and were hewing out rocks to build a schoolhouse. That was the beginning of, I think, District 53. We called it the ‘Little Rock School’. George, Orval, Evelyn, Joseph, and Theordore Duncan, all went to school there.
I don’t know if it is still there. My grandmother was the first school teacher there. It was just a little hand built rock school and they had built a little wooden front to it to have a little place to hang coats and a shelf to put their lunch buckets. We had to take our lunch buckets in and set them around the stove in the winter because they were frozen solid otherwise. I thought it was an interesting story.