Rev. Vanderhoof and FBCS

Part Two

Arizona Territorial Normal School

Verner’s first year in Arizona Territory as a citrus day laborer was difficult and wages were less than ideal. However, when things seemed at their worst, he received a letter from his mother in which she wrote, “Find a job as soon as you can, son, your father and I don’t want you running the streets. We want you to get an education.”

In the fall of 1893, to fulfill his parents’ written desires for him, Verner entered the Arizona Territorial Normal School in Tempe with 64 other pupils. There were 3 teachers, Prof. Storment, Miss Hildebrand, and Mrs. Spafford. It was a 3-year school at the time but a Teacher Training Department was opened in January of 1896 and he chose to continue the next year to receive the extra Teacher Training course. There were 17 in the class of 1897 to graduate. Vanderhoof was elected the President of the class and was asked to deliver the oration at graduation time in 1897.

Verner became a lifetime friend of a classmate, Carl Hayden, who went on to become United States Senator from Arizona and the longest serving member of Congress. After Scottsdale High School was built on Indian School Road north of the original church, a granddaughter, Betty Jane (Mathis) Crow, recalls she could see the Vanderhoof home west of the church out of a window at school. She would often see a long black car with a chauffeur standing beside it and knew that Carl Hayden was visiting with her grandfather again.

However, in Verner’s eyes, the most important member of that class was Miss Jane Phoebe Martin from Prescott. When Jane was eight years old, she and her parents traveled to Arizona Territory from Kansas in a covered wagon in hopes of improving her mother’s health. After receiving all the education she could in the Prescott schools, Jane had traveled down to Tempe so that she could finish her education. In addition to finishing her education in order to teach, she consented in July of 1897 to become Mrs. Verner A. Vanderhoof.