Have you ever wondered where all of the one-room schools were located in Green County, what they looked like, who attended them, who taught at them, or what happened to the buildings after the last of them closed in the 1960s? Matt Figi, Monroe, published a book in 1996 about the Enterprise School that he attended in Clarno Township. The book included 19 photos of the groups of students, a list of the teachers who taught there from the 1860s until the school closed in 1964, and a history of the school. Figi has been collecting copies of all of these items from each of the other 119 rural schools since he retired from teaching in 2004 and moved back from Indiana.

Since the youngest students who attended these schools are now in their sixties, Figi is afraid that knowledge of these schools will be lost in a few decades. He has collected about 500 photos of the groups of the children from the various schools and is working on identifying as many people in the photos as possible. He has a computerized list with almost 7,000 teacher/year/school entries that can be alphabetized by teacher or school to determine who taught at a specific school or to list the schools where an individual person taught. In addition, Figi has gleaned much information from the clerk/treasurer records that have been housed in the local school systems and the local historical societies, as well as the Wisconsin Historical Society. He has also presented programs where he has shared the information that he has collected and borrowed photos and documents from individuals.

When he is “finished” with the project, Figi will deposit this collection in a public institution in Monroe to make it available for future generations. He would like to see all of the rural school records from the entire county in one site since many families attended several of the schools throughout the county, which makes it difficult to find the records in various repositories. This is especially hard for those who travel back to Green County to search their roots.

Figi would be interested in borrowing any photographs of the groups of students or the schoolhouses that he may not have. Newspaper articles are also very helpful. He would also like to borrow any clerk/treasurer records of the schools that might now be in private hands. Since Figi lives in the south part of the county, he doesn’t have nearly as much information about the schools in the north part of the county. Matt Figi may be contacted at mfigi48@tds.net or (608) 325-6503.