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Greenwood School, north of Interstate 84, east of Hazelton. Annie Pike Greenwood was the first teacher at this school in the 1910s. This is a sad picture of abandoned hopes. The school was formerly surrounded by huge cottonwood trees, (April, 1993).
Mount Harrison of the Albion Range (the Minidokas of Annie Pike Greenwood) viewed from Interstate 84 near Hazelton, (august, 1992).

"We Sagebrush Folks"
Farm life in the Magic Valley near Hazelton, as evocatively described by Annie Greenwood in "We Sagebrush Folks," was cruel. Even with the new irrigation schemes, there was never enough water. After several wet years, 1919 saw a severe drought. The Twin Falls Canal Company supplied only 30% of its normal amount.

Annie Pike Greenwood was the first school teacher in the Hazelton area.She was an educated woman who grew up in Provo, Utah, and wrote poignantly about early farm life in the Magic Valley. Her husband had dreamed of being a farmer, though he came from an upper class German family. They homesteaded in Hazelton in 1906, and soon after, the North Side (milner-Jerome) canal was constructed.

She said in retrospect "The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go on a farm." It was never easy, and at times brutal, raising a family of four in beautiful, gentle yet harsh, rural Idaho. They lost the farm in 1924. "We lost the farm, thank God!"

She became a teacher and a writer after leaving her husband, who sold insurance and then worked for the Soil Conservation Service. The Greenwood home and the Greenwood Community School can be seen just north of Interstate 84, east of Twin Falls. The Albion Mountains (her Minidokas) rise to the south.

Annie Pike Greenwood on farming near Hazleton (1934):

"Never were nights so sweet as those in Idaho. The air seemed to caress you; millions and millions of stars glowed in such a depth of the heavens as I have never seen elsewhere. Every sense was awakened, and soothed. Such was my first Idaho night.... Such was the last night I ever spent there. Such were nearly all the nights I saw and heard and breathed there." (p. 23).

"All my senses resounded to that sagebrush farm. Never a day passed that I was not thrilled with the changing beauty of the vast cloud-filled skies, the purple and gold sunsets, the blue and white mountains, our gray and green valley, our own lovely, undulating farm, with its ivory wheat-fields, its green beet-fields, its purple-blooming alfalfa. I loved to go to sleep to the chorus of the crickets in the grass just outside my window, with its thorough-bass of the frogs down along the canal. The cool, delightful summer nights; the limitless stretches of clean, white winter snow." (p. 170-171)

"The sweet November rain in Idaho, fragrant, musical, soaking the ground in preparation for winter, running in streams from eaves - intoxicating delight of calm, delicately gray November days." (p. 136-137).

"I could see the road below, and the sight I saw will never again be duplicated-- a river of rabbits, running from west to east, the closely packed little animals moving like rippling water, on their way somewhere. And near at hand, because we were the invaders of the wilderness and not they, the sharp, staccato barks of the desert dogs, coyotes, and their long, maniacal wails. The sight, the sound, they struck a chill to my heart." (p. 94).

"As I sat forcing myself to study after school, when I was already tired beyond my strength, I often lifted my eyes from my books, and there through the window, across the dazzling, alabaster snow, the cold, white Minidokas stood, monumental, veined with blue, a faint pinkish light illuminating them from the setting sun. 1 forgot the page I had been studying, and a chill struck to my heart." (p. 94).
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