South Pass City schoolhouse
— — a room left ready for Monday morning.
Not only on a wall.
“A one-room schoolhouse on the high sagebrush bench above the Sweetwater, in a gold camp that filled fast in 1868 and was nearly empty by the time the next century started. The desks face a small chalkboard. The light through the south windows is the same light that came across the South Pass for the wagon trains. Today South Pass City is a state historic site, and the schoolhouse is one of the buildings the state has held back from the wind. — from the studio
South Pass City schoolhouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
South Pass City sits at about 7,800 feet on the southern flank of the Wind River Range, a few miles north of South Pass itself — the broad, low saddle through the Continental Divide that carried the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails west. The town was founded in 1867 around the Carissa gold lode and held perhaps 2,000 people at its peak. The State of Wyoming has preserved more than two dozen original structures, including the schoolhouse, as part of South Pass City State Historic Site in Fremont County.
South Pass City carries an outsized place in American suffrage history. In 1869 the territorial legislator William H. Bright introduced the bill that made Wyoming the first government in the modern world to grant women the vote. Esther Hobart Morris, who kept house in South Pass City, was appointed justice of the peace there in 1870 — the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States. The schoolhouse and the surrounding buildings date to this same brief window, when the camp was loud, optimistic, and inventing what the state would become.
The site is open seasonally, typically mid-May through the end of September, on Wyoming Highway 28 between Lander and Farson. A small visitor center sits at the entrance and the buildings line a single dirt main street along Willow Creek. The schoolhouse stands at the upper end of that street with the rest of the residential block. Winters here are long and the road in is plowed but exposed; most visitors come in July and August, when the sagebrush is warm and the swallows are working the eaves.