A Teacher They'll Never Forget

Frontier House's Judy Harding

“Where did you find that clay?” the newly arrived teacher asked when she first encountered Aine and Tracey Clune, their bodies painted with red clay, their homestead clothes ripped into more revealing attire. These rebellious teenage cousins, along with four other children living the lives of 1883 homesteaders, were about to experience a teacher they’ll never forget.

Outside the schoolhouse are bottom row, left to right: Erinn Patton, Logan Patton, and Conor Clune. Top row: Tracey Clune, Aine Clune, Judy Harding, and Justin Clune.

Viewers of the widely popular PBS series Frontier House have to watch carefully to catch the body paint and torn prairie garments. But four months into the series, when Mrs. Judy Harding rings the bell for the first day of school, viewers are well aware of the sadness and negativity the pupils bring into the schoolhouse. It hasn’t been easy living in 1883.

A $3 million, six-hour production, Frontier House follows the lives of three families who live for five months as Montana homesteaders. Much in their lives is at the breaking point when Judy first meets Aine and Tracey. Even the stunning Montana surroundings—an undisclosed valley in the Absarokee Mountains—offer little compensation for the backbreaking and tedious work, the isolation, the erratic weather, and the memories of creature comforts that exist for the rest of the world in 2001. The girls long for cosmetics, the parents for privacy, the children for Hershey bars and friends. Kids from one family barely speak to those in the other and they do not even sit together during lunch the first week at school.

Enter Judy Hove Harding ’63, schoolteacher extraordinaire.

Retired from a teaching career that spanned nearly thirty years, Judy received a phone call at her Helena home in April 2001. New York’s public television station WNET Channel 13 was in Montana, ready to film Frontier House. Education was required by law in Montana Territory in 1883, and Frontier House needed a schoolteacher. Would Judy consider? Certainly, she replied.

Judy sent her résumé-letter to Simon Shaw, the award-winning producer of the hit British PBS series 1900 House, Frontier House’s predecessor. In it she lists teaching French, Spanish, English, music, library, guitar, and art in K–12, college, and adult education classrooms; receiving a Teacher of the Year award; a listing in Who’s Who in American Education; international travel and study; and a co-starring role in a state-sponsored film of Lewis and Clark’s travels across Montana for the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. Her bachelor’s degree from UM was in French, with Spanish as a minor. She earned master’s and doctorate degrees in education at Montana State University, writing her doctoral thesis on the relationship of music to teaching.

Judy ends her letter by describing how as a small child she attended a one-room country school near Ray, North Dakota. “That short time has lived in my memories as an all-time favorite,” she writes. “I have often thought I’d like to teach in such a school sometime. (I have also rather wondered how we all survived drinking from the same dipper out of one pail.)” Shaw hired Judy immediately and she set out to learn all she could about teaching and education in Montana Territory in 1883.

Errin and Logan Patton "carpool" to school.

Helena is the perfect city for historical research and Judy was thrilled with the wealth of materials available. By the time she met with the frontier families to discuss schooling, she knew every historical option available to set up and finance their school. The families decided on a subscription school, paying for the teacher’s salary themselves—$1.42 per child, rounded up to about $2 to include supplies. Then they converted an abandoned sheep shed into the schoolhouse.

Judy’s research revealed that frontier teachers taught whatever subjects and skills they knew and used whatever materials they had available. Many schoolteachers knew how to sew and quilt, so their students learned to sew and quilt. “Everything around you was educational,” Judy explains. So when the two rebellious girls arrived that day wearing body paint, Harding immediately thought of another thing she could teach the students.

Harding has been a potter for years, taking workshops at Helena’s Archie Bray Foundation and sharing a studio with other Helena potters. Aine and Tracey Clune showed Judy the pond where they’d found their red clay, and she soon had all the students making their own clay slip from the mud. Many pottery pieces they made became important implements in the homesteaders’ cabins.

“My number one goal was to get these kids together,” Judy says, reflecting on the clannish behavior then evident in the children. “Luckily, Logan Patton had a birthday coming.” On his birthday, Judy insisted all the children sit together at lunch. When they’d moved together, she brought out a cake. The children ate together every day thereafter.

Another unifying device Judy used was music. She’s renowned for her workshops on teaching guitar, especially to people who don’t read music. Judy soon had all the children playing chords on guitars, singing, and writing their own songs. “Music was the biggest challenge and the biggest reward,” she explains. “Polly Wolly Doodle” didn’t grab the children’s attention, but they grew to love many other folk songs that taught them history at the same time.

Judy took issue with the series’ narrative that describes the frontier teacher as frequently an uneducated girl, often as young as fifteen. Her research uncovered a different story, particularly in Montana. “In 1846,” she explains, “the National Board of Popular Education set out to educate the frontier. This program took only single, young women, trained them for two years—primarily in Boston—and only then sent them out to teach.” In 1846 the “frontier” was Ohio, but as the country became more settled, teachers traveled further and further west. By the 1880s, Montana Territory had 203 common schools, most with well-qualified teachers. “Montanans were willing to tax their citizens one of the highest rates in the country to guarantee good public education,” Judy continues. “And every county in the Montana Territory had a superintendent of education.”

Judy’s favorite story of a qualified Montana schoolteacher is Olive Pickering, a single, young, educated woman who traveled in 1878 by rail and stagecoach to teach in Montana. Although her marriage to John Rankin ended her professional teaching career, Olive’s love for education definitely helped shape the lives of the Rankins’ six children. All graduated from UM, with daughter Jeannette Rankin going on to receive international acclaim as the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Another Rankin daughter, Harriet, was dean of women at UM from 1920 to 1935. A son, Wellington, was the first UM graduate to attend Oxford University in England.

The date for the Frontier House series was chosen to coincide with the year that the east and west tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway met in Montana Territory. A transcontinental railroad meant more supplies available for Montana homesteaders and, of course, more contact with the outside world. Judy used this historical event as the basis for songs and a play the students wrote describing the people who helped bring the railroad to Montana.

An unforgettable television moment occurs when Judy presents the students with three oranges—their first fresh fruit in months—to celebrate the driving of the transcontinental spike. “These oranges would now be available to the homesteaders,” she explains to the children, “but they would be very expensive, and that’s why we have to share.” The children smell and rub the carefully peeled rinds, slowly lick the juice from between their fingers, and savor each slice like none they’ve eaten before.

“There were afternoons in that sheep shed [schoolhouse] that were so hot we would practically drain the entire crock of drinking water and sometimes we’d retreat to the shade of the trees to continue our studies,” Judy recalls. “A couple of days were so cold and the children so wet that we hardly left the tin square that surrounded the woodstove. One day it was too dark to read, so we had to work on everything orally. We munched on slices of raw potato browned on top of the stove, told stories, practiced Spanish, recited poems, and made up songs. Every day the dust from the sawdust floor burned my eyes, nose, and throat, but these things were truly a small price to pay for the joy of working with those children.” Judy’s students shared a water dipper as she had in her own one-room schoolhouse many years before. However, Frontier House children then poured their water into individual cups—a concession to modern day health practice.

The children missed nearly two months of actual school while making Frontier House. It was up to Judy to keep them current in their regular studies as well as provide their 1883 education. (During filming, the kids’ 2001 textbooks were kept hidden in their desks.) “I had to study every night myself, to keep up with their studies,” she admits. Judy relied on the one-room schoolhouse technique of having older students teach and tutor the younger ones. Kristen Brooks, the newly married Frontier House participant, also helped tutor. “It does take a village,” Judy says, “for students and adults to receive the finest education.”

As the school term ended and the series wound to its close, Judy’s calming and enriching presence became evident throughout the community. Kristen often came to school, assisting Judy and participating in the art projects. “When she saw the kids learning guitar, she was so excited and wanted to learn too,” Judy says. “Kristen wanted to play guitar so she could sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and she wanted to learn how to speak Spanish. She fit right into our curriculum.”

“All of the adults were so supportive of the school, of me, and of my projects. They wanted to learn guitar and make pots too, and I would loved to have taught them. I had thought we might be able to do an evening class or two for them, but we all found out there was just not time. We did have a potluck supper at the end of the term. It was very nice weather but then immediately turned very cold. We all moved inside, lit up the potbelly, and had our dinner and a great time inside the school. Gordon [Clune] had brought some hooch to put in the cider and heated that on the potbelly for the adults. I spread my quilt on the sawdust floor to take the overflow of people. The kids played the guitars, and we all just had the nicest time.”

The students played and sang a song about friendship that Judy had written for the recitation program marking the end of the school year. Viewers don’t hear the words, but they do see smiles on the faces and tears in the eyes of nearly everyone present.

The students dream of someday returning to Montana and seeing Mrs. Harding again. “If we could have one day together what would you like to do?” she asked them. They all agreed that the perfect day would be, “at your house, playing guitar, and making pottery . . . all day long.” Logan Patton admits on camera that the Frontier House school “turned out to be the funnest thing in life!”

Last December Judy sent each student, now back in twenty-first century life, a special gift—a Christmas ornament in the shape of a frontier horse. She’d made them herself . . . out of red clay.

Betsy Holmquist ‘67, M.A. ‘83, writes the Alumni Association newsletter and Class Notes for the Montanan. A sixteen-year veteran of the Alumni Association, Betsy works just around the corner from her freshman dorm room.