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Small prairie home
The year of construction is unknown, but the fireplace in the house points back to the earliest time of land acquisition in the area. The chimney is on the outside of the living room wall with a built-in fireplace that was fired from the inside. The log house has only one room, and this construction was used by the first Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest. The teacher's residence is thus also a memory of how the new builders in the period after the sod house period got under cover for the winter, before they had cultivated enough land to be able to afford to build a bigger and better house.
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Education is the most important subject which we as people can be engaged in.
In the settler communities on the prairie the school and the teacher were important. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was common for the teacher to come straight from school himself, after a short teacher's course. After 1850, it became more common to follow a two-year teacher training course. It became more and more common for women to work as teachers, especially during and after the Civil War, and around the turn of the century up to 75% of teachers were women.
We don’t know whether there were male or female teachers in Brampton, but we know that the teacher's residence was in use and housed the school principal in Brampton and his family until the mid-1930s.
Sanford and Genevieve Cooper were the last owners of the teacher's residence, and donated the house to the Emigration Center in 1997. The house was rebuilt and ready as part of the prairie village in the year 2000.
The teacher's residence has housed several exhibitions, and until spring 2024 you could see the exhibition Memories of a War, a collection of objects and photos from the Second World War and the 99th Battalion.