HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF THE UPPER MOJAVE DESERT
P. O. Box 2001, Ridgecrest, CA 93556
Vol. 23 No. 1 January 2008 _________________________________________________________________________
BROWN - A TOWN AND A SCHOOL
With the start of construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1908, a railroad soon followed. The main lines of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific had reached Mojave in 1876, but the path north to the Owens River were the routes (should I say “ruts” ) of the freighters and stage lines. The city of Los Angeles had a real problem: how to move a massive amount (some say a quarter of a million tons) of construction material and hundreds (thousands eventually) of workers. The solution: the SP built a standard gauge line north, ducked Red Rock Canyon by swinging around the east end of the El Pasos, then looping down into the Indian Wells Valley and points due north to Little Lake and Owens Lake to meet the narrow gauge Carson & Colorado RR at Lone Pine (Owenyo).
Major construction camps were established along the RR line. The camp at Siding 18, later to be called “Brown”, after the name of a hotel built there by George Brown, was located nine miles north of the present-day Inyokern. There tent barracks and messing facilities for hundreds of aqueduct workers, as well as medical facilities, large warehouses, large corrals for hundreds of mules and horses, and more, were built. With the completion of the rail line in 1910, settlers had begun to arrive into the Indian Wells Valley. Prospectors were also coming through Brown to reach the mining “excitements” in the Panamint and Argus mountains. In addition to the hotel, Brown soon had a post office, large general store and a larger saloon. And, more importantly, was the need for schools.
The settlers took the initiative under the leadership of Henry F. W. Schuette (“Hank” Schuette’s father) and Will Callaway to form the first school district at Leliter (Siding 17) in 1911, followed by the Orchard, Los Flores and Magnolia (Inyokern) school districts. “Hank” Schuette compiled a history of the schools in the Indian Wells Valley, so that story won’t be repeated here. Suffice to say that circa 1920 the four schools (districts) were consolidated in Inyokern and a new school created in Brown with a new teacher, Ethel Mary Standard.
Ethel Mary Standard known to her students and their parents as ‘Mrs. Standard,” but to history she was “Tiny”. Born Ethel Mary Hibbard, she graduated from Pomona (CA) high school in 1907, enrolled in Mills College near San Francisco in 1910, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1915. After graduation she taught in Pomona Junior High School for 2 1/2 years. She met and married Earl Standard in 1918, lived in San Bernardino, then up to the Indian Wells Valley for her husband’s health in 1920 and the Brown School.
She taught for 31 years - all grades up through the Eighth - in a one room school initially. The enrollments were small: seven students, five students, 11 students etc., in different grades year after year. Her teaching methods were very different and novel from the normal practices then and now. One might say unorthodox, but they were very effective. So much so, that her reputation soon grew beyond our desert boundaries. School authorities came from the county seat, Bakersfield, across the Sierras to study her methods. She was very innovative in having her students highly interactive with the instruction, rather than solely being passive listeners. A specific subject would be studied the entire day for several days rather than a bit of several subjects each day and so on.
In an unpublished manuscript, Mrs. Litha Crowell Mattis of Ridgecrest describes her four years in grades Five through Eight at Brown School starting in 1942. A new school building had just been completed. Still only one classroom, the others being a kitchen, library/dining room and multipurpose. Why a kitchen? The students formed teams to cook their own lunches. (Tiny furnished the food). School started in the fall of 1942 with enrollment of 13, which had declined to five by Christmastime. The largest enrollment that Tiny handled was 27 (spread up to Eighth Grade) in 1944 when the China Lake naval base was under construction. Mrs. Mattis’ examples of Tiny’s teaching methods make
most interesting reading and are highly complimentary.
Tiny continued on until 1951. By this time she was teaching descendants of her early students. Before she retired, however, she accomplished a goal that she long sought. From the beginning she called her school the “Mount Owen School”. She also petitioned the Postal Service for many years to change the name of the post office from ‘Brown” to “Mount Owen”. And Mount Owen it became on May 15, 1948.
Tiny and her husband retired to their home place in Grapevine Canyon. There are no physical features still standing at the Brown townsite. One can walk around and see some evidence of foundations and some scraps. But if you stand very still and quiet you may faintly hear a school bell ringing.