In the middle of nowhere, an old white frame building is all that remains of a heart-felt dream that in 1893 opened its doors to frontier kids who wanted the kind of education not otherwise available in the Dakota Territories before the turn of the century. A wide and remarkable monument stands proudly out front, a tribute to the dreamer, the Rev. Mr. Lewis E. Camfield, a blood relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson, fellow abolitionist, and almost as much a transcendental visionary.
One day in 1892, Camfield and a friend were out among the sodbusters of Charles Mix County, collecting donations for the education of black children in the American South. At the end of the day, when they tallied the purse, they were amazed--they had twenty dollars. They were thrilled. That’s when they came up with the idea: if a hundred dirt-poor farmers and would-be ranchers could cough up that kind of money for needy kids a thousand miles away, shouldn’t it be possible to create a school that would serve their own children right here?
So the Reverend Mr. Camfield said he’d try, and just a year later, Ward Academy opened its doors to 23 students.
In a few years, the place had admirable facilities and close to 150 enrolled. Tuition—nine months’ worth—was nothing to sneeze at $100. Most kids worked on the grounds and the farm the school created to pay the bill. In 1911, when the enrollment hit an all-time high of 148 students, Warren Hall was built, an edifice three stories high—and a basement—that cost in total $20,000.
Be sure, Warren Hall was, “commodius,” or so the Reverend Camfield himself described it. All the modern conveniences--a common dining hall, an assembly room, an office, and two dormitories—one for women, the other for teachers.
The broad prairie around Academy, South Dakota, is so flat and wide people like to say you can watch your dog run away for three days, no matter the direction. Amid that kind of land, try to imagine sky-scraping Warren Hall, a three-story monster, tall and formidable as a battleship, a fortress for education amid eternal land and sky.
Today, what’s left is a one old building that sits up on a knoll as if still proclaiming the importance of higher education. Ward Academy hasn’t seen a student in years. "The Academy church, school and neighborhood suffered the greatest loss in its history," a local newspaper wrote in 1923, "when Ella died." And then, thirty-nine years after its energetic birth, Ward Academy formally shut its doors. It was 1931—the Dust Bowl, the Depression, end of story.
Once upon a time the Camfields were true giants in the earth out here where almost always the wind blows free. Really, in the middle of nowhere, Ward Academy did what it was created to do for as long as it possibly could.
We all should be so blessed.
