Date: 1952

 

Description: This ticket was issued for a community square dance held at Franklin Elementary School. Franklin was built in 1889 at East 9th and Plymouth Street, which is now Lewis Boulevard. When it was first built there was no indoor toilet or central furnace. Students and teachers instead had to use an outhouse, and each classroom had a coal burning stove for warmth. The school was also called Cole’s Addition School, serviced a neighborhood called Cole’s Addition, one of the earliest expanses eastward from Dr. Cook’s original plat of Sioux City. Cole’s Addition was founded in 1869 as a real estate venture by Austin Cole, a member of Sioux City’s early real estate market. It occupied an area north of where the Floyd Cemetery is today, along Division Street from 7th to 11th Street. The main residents of the area were people employed in the meat and manufacturing industries, similar to the Bottoms neighborhoods. Franklin was mainly an elementary school, with most of the students moving on to Woodrow Wilson Junior and then East or Central High.

 

Cole’s Addition remained a major working class community through the life of the Sioux City’s meat industry, and had developed an organized neighborhood community by 1920. The residents there held yearly picnics to celebrate the neighborhood and recollect times gone by, and this tradition lasted up through the 1970s. By then, most of the older residents of the neighborhood had passed on, and the younger generations had moved away due to the declining meat industry, seeking new housing and business opportunities in Morningside and Westside. Today there are still people living in the area of Cole’s Addition, but the neighborhood has lost its individual identity and has since been combined with Kelly’s Park and other additions to simply be called the “East Side.” Franklin Elementary closed in the early 1980s and was razed in the 1990s. Its students transferred to Grant and McKinley Elementary schools, which have since merged into Unity Elementary. Along with these schools, the Floyd River Valley communities also had the Hobson School, which was rebuilt in 1938 and eventually used for a soup kitchen, and Lowell Elementary, which served the residents of Springdale.

 

Donor: Robert L. Hanson