FORT RILEY, Kan. - When children of Fort Riley Families needed to attend school in the 1880s, most ended up at St. Mary's Chapel on Main Post. Although it was a house of worship on Sundays, the small, limestone structure became a house of learning on weekdays.

"At Fort Riley, the chapel was used as a school house probably down through the 1890s," said William McKale, Fort Riley's supervisory museum curator.

In its history of the Chaplain Corps, the U.S. Army Chaplain Center and School reported that in addition to their regular duties, chaplains served the Army post as both schoolmasters and librarians.

"The act of 1838 mandated that the chaplain should perform the duties of schoolmaster at the post. At first, instruction was limited to children of officers and other Army personnel serving at the post. Later, this became more than a post school; it became a public free school for all persons of school age. Chaplains were allowed an assistant if necessary, but retained full responsibility for education," the chaplain center report said.

The majority of the students at St. Mary's Chapel were the children of enlisted Soldiers. An education at the school covered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Although some attended school at the chapel, most officers' children were home-schooled.

"There was a class distinction, and also those children probably were more advanced than what education they got in the chapel," McKale said.

Children had no need for a large book bag at a frontier post school. Instead, a single book, the McGuffey Reader, served as the standard textbook. In addition to reading and spelling lessons, the book outlined history, biology, astronomy, zoology, botany, table manners, behavior towards Family and attitudes toward God and teachers, the National Park Service reported in a 1993 article.

"McGuffey's Readers were among the first textbooks in America that were designed to become progressively more challenging with each volume. They used word repetition in the text as a learning tool, which built strong reading skills through challenging reading. Sounding-out, enunciation and accents were emphasized.

Colonial-era texts had offered dull lists of 20 to 100 new words per page for memorization. In contrast, McGuffey used new vocabulary words in the context of real literature, gradually introducing new words and carefully repeating the old," the NPS article stated.

Junction City began building its own school system in the 1860s. However, the distance to those schools from Fort Riley made it impractical for the post's children to travel on a daily basis. By the 1890s, the post's leadership established regular transportation for students to Junction City schools, using ambulances and wagons