History of the Jenny Lind School
as it relates to the Sinclair Family
by John Hofstetter
Jenny Lind School should properly have as its school mascot the phoenix because it is literally rising from the ashes.
Prior to 1872, there was no Jenny Lind School. The few children where the Jenny Lind townsite is, crossed the river and attended school at Brushville. Just how they crossed the river in Winter is not clear to me. Children in the surrounding areas on the Jenny Lind side of the river went to Cloverdale School just down the road from the new Jenny Lind School at the intersection of Highway 26 and Olive Orchard Road, or to Chaparral School which was at Stone Corral, or to Evergreen School which originally was a couple of miles closer to Burson than where the school and the residence it has become is located now.
By 1872, placer mining was in full swing with the first of a continuing series of dredging operations going full blast, and there were enough children living on the Jenny Lind side of the river to warrant a school there. The Brushville District was divided and all of the district on the Jenny Lind side of the river became Jenny Lind and the other side of the river remained Brushville. In 1892 because of the large number of children just across the river from Jenny Lind, Brushville divided and the Riverside district was formed with the school being built about a mile down Milton Road from Jenny Lind.
Most of the original buildings built by the dredging companies are gone in Jenny Lind, but when I was going to school at Jenny Lind, most of the buildings in town had been built by the dredging companies. There was a church and a fraternal hall on the hill overlooking the town and the hall which was an adobe building covered with clapboard was converted into a school.
Seemingly not related at the time to Jenny Lind School, out at Chaparral School at Stone Corral a young man by the name of James Monroe Sinclair was teaching the children of that area including 1st grader, Grace Wright, one of the offspring of the Wrights who owned Stone Corral Ranch at that time.
In 1904, James Monroe Sinclair married Grace Wright, who was now a decent amount older than when she had been his student. Monroe as he was called, had become a successful drygoods merchant in Jenny Lind, owning the store next to his brother Frank's grocery store. The remains of the stores owned by the two Sinclair brothers are still easily seen on the South side of the street in Jenny Lind as the stone and adobe from which they were built has endured to some extent. Monroe also was the Hartford Life Insurance Agent, the postmaster, the telephone exchange, and on Sundays was the preacher at the Stone Corral Church. He also did carpentry work as it was available.
On May 11, 1908 Monroe and Grace had a daughter, Margaret Lucile Sinclair, who until her brother, Keith, was born 12 years later, was the focus of the family and was, according to one of her childhood friends turned author, denied practically nothing, being, from the point of view of her friend, "spoiled".
Monroe had graduated from the Stockton Business College and Normal Institute in June of 1888. A Normal School was the name given to teacher training institutions prior to about 1940. Monroe taught at a number of schools in Calaveras County ranging from Murphys to Valley Springs, to Chaparral, to Riverside, which was almost in Jenny Lind. When his store burned, Monroe became the teacher at Jenny Lind School and was there during most of the late 20s and through the 30s until two years before his fatal car crash in 1936. His students were taught carpentry and added the back end of the school as part of their vocational training. That addition was used as the carpentry shop and as a library.
Monroe's daughter, Margaret who had begun her teaching career in Murphys working for Mr. Redding, the Principal and a former student of Monroes, became the teacher at Jenny Lind and was there for most of the 40s, the period that her son, John Hofstetter, was in school. School boards were notoriously stingy, plus money was really tight during those years, so my mother, unlike my grandfather, but like most of the teachers in the one room schools in those days, moved from school to school, including leaving and returning to Jenny Lind a number of times, as the only way to get a raise was to change jobs.
By 1953, the Evergreen School population had dwindled to the point that it could no longer sustain a school and that district joined with Jenny Lind in becoming the Jenny Lind - Evergreen School District.
In 1954, I was home from college where I was working on a degree in bacteriology, and a group of folks dropped by my mother's house. They were mostly my relatives either by blood or marriage, along with some of Arlene Nichols Hodgson's relatives who were the Jenny Lind trustees at that time. They told me that they wanted me to teach the following year, and offered me the astounding sum of $3000 for the year. I told them that I didn't know how to teach as I had had no training. They said that of course I could teach because my grandfather and mother could teach and they must have assumed that teaching was an inherited trait. (They may have been right to some extent).
That January of 1954, my students and I celebrated my 21st birthday together and in the Spring of 1955 as plans were being made to close the school due to unification of the district, my students, my wife to be, Wanda, and I celebrated the beginning of Wanda's and my life together, and mourned what we thought was the end forever, of the Jenny Lind School.
The building and property was sold by the district to an Indian Herb doctor and it burned down a few years later. I consoled myself by telling myself that at least the thick adobe walls would be there for me to show my children and grandchildren as there were many 100 year old adobe walls left in town. Well the adobe makers that worked on the building that became the school must have used a different adobe recipe as one wet winter washed the walls flat to the ground.
I transferred to Murphys following my grandfather and mother in the line of teachers at that school as I had at Jenny Lind, and then later became Principal at Valley Springs becoming the 3rd generation Sinclair/Hofstetter there as well.