Georgie Digs!
According to her memoirs, after 1891-born Annie Forbach had attended school in Mammoth, Arizona, she attended the new school that had been established along Aravaipa Creek because by then there were more people with families living there. The first teacher at the Aravaipa Creek school was Margaret Turner who had taught school in Mammoth, and she boarded with Annie’s parents, the James Brandenburgs, early Aravaipa Creek settlers. Annie, in sixth grade then, and the teacher who taught all the grades, had to walk three miles to school, having to cross the creek eight times. After teaching her second year there, in 1904 Margaret Turner married Annie’s brother, William Brandenburg. Annie’s seventh grade teacher was a Mrs. Dodge, and that was Annie’s last year at the Aravaipa school.
Annie then went to Tempe Normal Training School to complete her eighth grade, and to get there her parents took her to Winkelman in their wagon and team to board the train for Tempe, where she was met by a Mr. Finch in his horse-drawn bus. After Annie’s eighth grade graduation, she left on the train to Winkelman and was met by her parents with their wagon and team.
Annie returned to Tempe Normal as a Freshman in 1907, and she wrote that as time went on, students from Kelvin, Ray, Florence, and even Globe came on the Winkelman train to Tempe, and those from Globe came to Christmas then to Winkelman, and those from Ray caught the train at Kelvin.
After Annie’s graduation, she became a first grade teacher in Winkelman where the school house was a one-room converted tent house. The next year she started teaching in Hayden where an extra first grade teacher was needed. She taught two years in Hayden, and most of the time she walked there from the Winkelman property she had bought, which was a four-room house with four lots. When there was a vacancy in the Winkelman school’s first grade in 1915, she applied and got that position, and the new school there was on a flat hill higher than the town of Winkelman.
There is so much more in Annie’s memoirs that I would like to mention about Hayden, Winkelman, and surrounding areas – also people! Hopefully I will in another article or two.