New One-Room Schoolhouse Opens In Wyoming’s “Little Siberia”

LITTLE SIBERIA — They don’t call the lonely northern reaches of Albany County, Wyoming, “Little Siberia” for nothing.

Head north out of Laramie on Highway 30, and after about 40 minutes you’ll arrive in Rock River, the county’s only other incorporated town.

Rock River isn’t very big; in fact, city slickers might call it one of those “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” spots along the highway.

But it’s downright metropolitan compared to the territory travelers enter once they take a right off the highway just north of town and onto Fetterman Road.

Even just a couple of miles in, it has the feel of the Steppes of Russia. Vastness stretches out in every direction — stark, forbidding, unforgiving and beautiful.

The journey has only just begun out to the Anderson family ranch, listed as being in Garrett, Wyoming.

Not Exactly A Good School Bus Route

Rumbling along ever-narrowing gravel roads, it takes about another 90 minutes to get to the ranch. That’s on a September day with near-perfect weather and bone-dry roads.

During winter, the journey just to Rock River, much less all the way into Laramie, can take two or three times as long. If that trip can be taken at all.

A stalwart road crew based in Rock River does its best to clear the snow from Little Siberia’s 100 or so miles of roads during winter.

That task can take all day. And sometimes, screaming winds blow snow right back over the road after they’ve passed through.

Imagine being a kid having to ride a school bus through all of that, day after day, hours a day.

Or a parent missing your child for all of those extra hours each school day with the nagging worry over the safety of their travels always in the back of your mind.

That’s what Anna and Carson Anderson decided was unacceptable for their two school-aged children, Emmitt and Waverly.

A Lonely Schoolhouse With A Class Of Two

The Andersons decided to do something about it and get the rural school in their area re-opened so that theirs and other ranchers’ kids would have options besides homeschooling or epic journeys to and from public schools in Rock River and Laramie.

It took them six years of wrangling with the courts and lobbying the Wyoming Legislature. But earlier this month, the Antelope Creek School finally opened on a parcel of their ranch the Andersons set aside for that purpose, not far from their house.

It’s Albany County School District No. 1’s most remote school, a modern iteration of the one-room schoolhouse that was the hallmark of American and Western education until just a few decades ago.

Newly-hired teacher Lexi Horblit lives onsite and is starting out with a class of two — Emmitt and Waverly.

Although the schoolroom section of the building is about the size of a modest living room, there’s still enough space for at least a couple more students to join them.

Much More Than Just A School

Carson told Cowboy State Daily that the school means much more than just an education for his children. It helps preserve the way of life his family has treasured in Little Siberia for five generations and about 125 years.

In the least populated state with huge, wide-open spaces, it means something for Wyomingites to consider an area truly in the middle of nowhere. Little Siberia is in the middle of nowhere.

Living all the way out there isn’t for everybody, Carson said, but that’s the point.

“The first couple of winters out here are tough” for newcomers, he said.

He noted that during the epic winter of 2022-2023, the road crew just couldn’t keep up with snowfall and wind-fueled ground blizzards, and Little Siberia was cut off from the rest of the world for seven weeks.

“But once you get used to that, you appreciate the freedom of being out here,” he said. “I think I feel more free than most people do.”

He and Anna want that for their children.

What’s more, their family bond is incredibly tight.

It has to be, Carson said. After all, how else could they run a ranch in such a far-flung place if they didn’t treasure each other’s company?

“The thought of my family not being here with me is what really motivated me” (to get the school opened), he said.

Anna said she’s adamant not only her children, but all children deserve reasonable access to public education.

Describing herself as a “momma bear,” she told Cowboy State Daily that every “no” that they ran into along the way just motivated her that much more to see things through.

Everything Finally Came Together

Earlier this year, the Andersons seemed to have hit a final dead end when the Wyoming Supreme Court denied their request for the schoolhouse.

But Carson and Anna were way too invested at that point to even think about giving up.

They lobbied the Wyoming Legislature, with Rep. Trey Sherwood, D-Laramie, taking up their cause.

Sherwood told Cowboy State Daily that everything finally came together during the legislature’s 2024 session, and $300,000 to fund the Antelope Creek school was added to the final budget bill.

And the Albany County School District agreed to green-light the project.

Carbon County’s ‘White Elephant’ Finds A New Home

Then it was a matter of finding a building. The Andersons had the property, but building a school from the ground up wasn’t feasible.

Luckily, the perfect building was in Medicine Bow, nearly new and in great shape, but sitting almost empty.

It was bought with “impact funds” for a wind turbine project, Carbon County Commission Vice Chair Sue Jones told Cowboy State Daily.

It was intended to serve as an office for the local sheriff’s office deputies and the county road and bridge crew.

But not long afterward, the road and bridge department got a new shop building. And except for “stopping in once in a while to use the restroom,” the deputies weren’t using it either, Jones said.

The building had become a “white elephant” for Carbon County, sitting virtually unused in the parking lot of the new road and bridge shop in Medicine Bow, she said.

When word reached Carbon County that a new schoolhouse was needed in Little Siberia, the commission jumped at the chance to give the building a new home, she said.

In a “taxpayer-dollar for taxpayer-dollar” exchange that didn’t affect either county’s bottom line, Carbon County sold it to the Albany County school district for $80,000 she said.

Epic Building Move

When it came time to move the building, Jones knew who to turn to: former Carbon County building and grounds supervisor Jim Piche.

He owns Pioneer Mill and Construction in Rawlins, and had the personnel, equipment and expertise to move the building in one piece.

Getting it loaded on a huge flatbed truck-and-tailer rig was just the beginning, Piche told Cowboy State Daily.

Moving it all the way to the Anderson’s place was another matter entirely. It’s difficult enough to navigate regular vehicles into Little Siberia.

Moving a whole intact building on those ever-narrowing dirt and gravel roads “was a bastard,” Piche said.

The building is 24 feet wide. That means it could only just barely squeeze through numerous cattle-guard crossings along the way after posts on either side were removed.

In a couple of places, workers used chainsaws to cut the tops off of wooden posts that were too high for the building to clear.

“We had a whole crew coming in behind us, putting everything back together,” he said.

They left Medicine Bow at 9 a.m. on a Friday. That evening, they ended up “with two blown tires on the trailer” still 11 miles short of their goal.

A shop crew from Rock River scrambled to get the tires repaired.

They got rolling at 8:30 a.m. the next day and “it took until 1:30 that afternoon to go that last 11 miles,” Piche said.

Piche stayed onsite in his camper, making sure the building was properly set on its foundation and rigged with utilities.

“The Andersons have been really good to me,” he said.

Huge Change For New Teacher

It’s one thing bringing education to the most rural of areas in Wyoming. Finding a teacher willing to live on-site in the middle of nowhere to teach in the one-room schoolhouse was another challenge.

One side of the building is set up for the school, complete with a kitchen.

Horblit said that she and her students prepare their own lunches, making a lesson in home economics part of every school day.

The other side of the building serves as her personal living quarters.

Her new job at the Antelope Creek School is worlds apart from her last gig where she taught a class of 23 second graders in a suburban Denver-area school.

She’s transferred from one of the region’s largest metropolitan areas to one of its most isolated places and gone from 23 students to two.

Her colleagues in Colorado “though I was crazy” when she told them about her new job.

But Horblit said she’s a country girl at heart, having grown up in Wheatland and earned her education degree at the University of Wyoming.

“I love agriculture and the way of life, and I want to support that,” she told Cowboy State Daily.

A Sense Of Community

During a celebration of the school’s opening Tuesday, friends, neighbors, school district officials and others gathered to help the Andersons relish the hard-earned payoff of their efforts.

Area resident Kenny Curry matter-of-factly told Cowboy State Daily that delivering the mail around Little Siberia twice a week takes him “about four hours” for each run.

“He drives fast,” quipped another neighbor, Connie Mireles.

While it seems like an incredibly lonely place, Little Siberia has a strong sense of community, Anna said.

She hopes success of the Antelope Creek School can set a precedent for rural communities everywhere and a resurgence of the rural schoolhouse model and lifestyle that for so long was the backbone of Wyoming education.

Farm and ranch families and communities shouldn’t have to choose between staying close to one another and their children getting an education, she said.

She hopes that everything that she and Carson went through to get the school opened serves as an example for their children.

“Life’s hard,” she said. “You have to pick your hard, and this is the hard we picked.”

Contact Mark Heinz at mark@cowboystatedaily.com

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.