Archival Photograph Record
Juniper Creek Schoolhouse — Complete Class Photographs
1907 to 1937 — Thirty Years — Huerfano County, Colorado
Each photograph below was taken at Juniper Creek Schoolhouse. In each, the enrolled student count is noted. In each, the photograph shows one additional child. That child appears in no enrollment record, no attendance sheet, and no county census for any year in this record.
Juniper Creek Schoolhouse operated in a semi-rural section of Huerfano County, Colorado, from 1905 until June 14, 1937, when the building was formally decommissioned by the county school board following a consolidation with the Walsenburg district. Enrollment ranged between eight and fourteen students per year across the school's thirty-two year operation, drawn from homesteading families in the area between the Cucharas River drainage and the lower foothills of the Spanish Peaks. Most students were the children of ranchers, railroad workers, and dry farmers.
The Huerfano County school district maintained enrollment rolls, daily attendance sheets, and annual class photographs throughout the period. These documents are held in the county archive, where they were reviewed by the Obscura for a period of three weeks in 2019. The discrepancy between enrollment counts and photographed students was first noted in the archive's 1907 intake entry, where the enrollment roll lists ten students and the accompanying class photograph shows eleven. Subsequent photographs, examined year by year, show the same pattern in every case without exception: the photographic count exceeds the enrollment count by one.
Six photographs in the series contain written notations referencing the discrepancy. Three of these notations were made by the photographer (whose name does not appear in the district records). Two were made by teachers whose names do appear in the rolls. The 1924 notation is attributed to teacher Mabel Hargrove: "One child appeared on the plate whom I do not recall seating." The 1931 photograph was taken in the year Thomas Aldrich served as teacher; Aldrich was himself a student at the school in 1907, appearing in the first photograph in this series.
No explanation for the discrepancy has been located in any document reviewed by the archive. The child's face, position, and apparent age vary across photographs. The catalog record is presented below. The 1907 plate is available in this digital archive; later scans have not yet been added and are marked accordingly.
