Covington School was a two-room school built in 1938 at 13299 School Road, Covington, Baraga County, MI. It is current used as the home of the UP Made Artist Market, a project of the non-profit Community Women’s Group that is open from May to October. The market sells fine art and quality crafts from local artist in Upper Michigan. Local honey, jams, maple syrup, woven loom originals, paintings, wood art, sculpture, basketry, photography, paintings, cards, candles, soaps, jewelry, local authors, collectibles and antiques are available. There is something for everyone, with room for RV parking, a picnic area, and a playground for kids.
The property known as the Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Schoolhouse, a one-room school house built 1837, is located on the grounds of the Sugaw (Sugar) Creek Presbyterian Church at 101 Sugar Creek Rd. W., Charlotte, N.C. The latter is located at the corner of North Tryon and Sugar Creek Road. Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church was established in 1755. The church built the little building to house the distinguished Sugar Creek School, a classical Presbyterian school for boys 6 to 12 or 13. With the help of a Frenchman named Mr. Gillet, the students built their school, molding bricks out of mud, using creek sand as mortar, and making shingles out of wood.
This small, stalwart building overlooks a busy corner of North Tryon Street in the old Derita neighborhood in Charlotte, at the intersection where Sugar Creek Road changes from East to West. It’s been here since 1837, when the streets were dusty dirt paths—the same year Congress founded the Charlotte Mint to capitalize on the discovery of the area’s gold. The community was named for the Sugaree Indians, the original inhabitants of the area. The tribe didn’t have a written language, so the spelling has always been a matter of debate. The church and the street names matched until 1924, when Sugar Creek Presbyterian became Sugaw Creek Presbyterian at the request of the church’s minister, M. E. Peabody. To this day, nobody knows why he wanted to change the church’s name. All historical evidence shows “Sugar” as the original, true spelling of the creek and nearby church.
Today, the little brick Sugaw Creek School House building is humble and easy to overlook, overshadowed by its neighbors, such as the Asian Corner Mall with its potholes and parking lot car-washers, a Rite Aid Pharmacy, and Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church. In 1960, the school became a church museum. So now, instead of educating young boys, the building serves as a small museum, with a random collection of artifacts that spans the 1800s through the Korean War.
The Watton School is located on the northwest corner of Pirkola Road and Korpi Road in Section 19 of Covington Township, Baraga County, MI. It is privately owned. A long-time resident who lives across the street from this school remembers only that they called it the Watton School but not much more. He said that the current owner has done some structural work on the exterior.
Located on FM 56 across the Paluxy River from the town square in Glen Rose, TX, is the Paluxy Heritage Park. A final resting place for several historic dwellings from an earlier time in Somervell County, the park has a log home, an early stone home, an early school house, and several other historic structures. Paluxy Heritage Park is a great place to relax, or to freshen up. There are also a pavilion for picnicking and parties, and a playground for the kids. What’s great is that one can park here and walk over to Big Rocks Park. There’s a nice walkway that was recently constructed. This path runs along the Paluxy River and there are a dock and an overlook along the way. This walkway terminates at the dam just before Big Rocks Park. This is probably about a quarter-mile walk.
Lanham Mill School house, the old one-room schoolhouse from the Lanham Mill community, has been located and preserved at Paluxy Heritage Park. A historical marker placed by the Somervell County Historical Commission provides some history. It was built in 1901 by residents of the Lanham Mill School District, about five miles from Glen Rose. Ed and Ollie (Lanham) Martin donated the land upon which it sat for seventy years. It stood on the high bank of the Paluxy River above the popular swimming spot called ‘Blue Hole,’ now in Dinosaur Valley State Park. The school served eight grades, and the teacher would live with a family in the community. The building also doubled as a church house and community center, both during and after its use as an educational facility.
A Texas Historical Marker at the Lanham Mill Cemetery notes that the school had closed by 1947. Emmett and Elsie McFall, local farmers, rescued the building in the early 1960s. Not wanting the building to be torn down, the McFalls bought and moved it to their farm on the Paluxy River, one mile from its original site. Time has been kind to this little building. In 2002 Emmett and Elsie’s grandson Robert C. McFall, Johnson County Commissioner, and his family donated it to Somervell County to be preserved. He attended church in the building as a child and his father Jacob McFall attended school in the building. The Somervell County Historical Commission dedicates this preservation to his grandparents Emmett and Elsie McFall. A stipulation of Mr. McFall’s donation of the schoohouse was that Somervell County would always maintain it, and on occasion throughout the year that they have a day where the local kids could attend school here and have an experience of what education was like before calculators and computers.
The Ryland or Rylander School, located at 22808 Lower Skanee Road in Arvon Township, Baraga County, near Skanee, MI, was built in 1885. Its current use is as a private residence.
The Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park is a local history museum documenting Hopkins County, Texas, located in Sulphur Springs, the county seat. It is operated by the Hopkins County Historical Society. The Hopkins County Museum is located in the George H. Wilson house, which was built in 1910. The house itself is noted for its unique architectural features, including carved columns, a roof made of pressed tin, double-bricked walls, and a Regency-style domed ceiling. All of the building’s ceilings are original except one that is from a former local opera house. Its collections include Caddo artifacts, Civil War memorabilia, a doll collection, folk art, Paleolithic fossils, and period women’s clothing. The museum also displays a crystal chandelier from Maximilian I’s palace in Mexico City. Items that it exhibits have been donated by families living in Hopkins County.
The Heritage Park consists of 11 acres of historic houses and other buildings that have been moved to the site. In 2013, there were a total of 11 historic buildings in the Heritage Park, most of which date to the 19th century and have been restored. They include a working blacksmith shop, a chapel, a country store, farmhouses, a gristmill, log houses, and a print shop. The Earhart Log School is located at the Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park. The Atkins House, the oldest brick building in the county, is also included. According to the Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park, the Heritage Park endeavors to replicate “small town Texas around the turn of the century.”
The Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park have also held numerous special events, including a Folk Festival in May and Indian Summer in October. Indian Summer days includes a Dutch oven cooking contest as well as archaeological digs, candle dipping, Native American dance and storytelling, and exhibitions of blacksmithing, butter churning, and gristmilling. In addition, the Museum and Heritage Park host a 19th-century-style Christmas celebration, called Christmas in the Park, as well as arts and crafts festivals and bluegrass concerts. According to the Texas Historical Commission, the Museum and Heritage Park are considered historic sites along the former Bankhead Highway.
18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool Their Children
From Children’s MD website (Mar. 25, 2013)
[Editor’s note: Cathy Mullins of the St. Louis Homeschooling Activities, Resources. and Encouragement or SHARE homeschool support group in St. Louis, MO, sent me the piece below and wrote: “Great article from a SHARE mom who is a doctor!!!!” WSW.]
I’m going public today with a secret I’ve kept for a year—my husband and I are homeschooling our children. I never dreamed we would become homeschoolers. I wanted my kids integrated and socialized. I wanted their eyes opened to the realities of the world. I wanted the values we taught at home put to the test in the real world. But necessity drove me to consider homeschooling for my 2nd and 4th graders, and so I timidly attended a home school parent meeting last spring. Surprisingly it was full of doctors, lawyers, former public school teachers, and other professionals. These were not the stay-at-home-moms in long skirts that I expected. The face of homeschooling is changing. We are not all religious extremists or farmers, and our kids are not all overachieving academic nerds without social skills.
An estimated 2.04 million k12 children are home educated in the United States, a 75% increase since 1999. Although currently only 4% of all K12 students nationwide are educated at home, experts are predicting an exponential boom in homeschooling in the next 5-10 years. Most states even provide free online public schools, known as virtual schools or virtual homeschools for K12 students. An information site called College@Home provides some useful information.
For a year I was afraid to tell any of my work colleagues that we were homeschooling. People would stereotype me as a right-wing kook. My boss might assume that I couldn’t possibly be committed to an academic medical career. I wasn’t sure I could homeschool my kids well. I feared the whole year would be an academic failure and emotional nightmare. I was so unsure about this homeschooling experiment that I even kept a spare school uniform in case I had to send my kids back to school at the last moment.
Pequaming is an unincorporated community in L’Anse Township of Baraga County in the state of Michigan. It is located on a narrow point of land that juts into Keweenaw Bay. Although still partially inhabited, Pequaming is one of the largest ghost towns in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Originally home to an Ojibwe tribe settlement called Pequaquawaming, which means “the headland,” a narrow neck of land almost surrounded by water. In 1877, Charles Hebard and Edward Thurber purchased a large tract of land on Keweenaw Point, favored especially for its deep, protected harbor and easy access to timber. A mill began its operations under the name of Hebard and Thurber. At its peak, the town included the mill, a company store, offices, boarding houses, hotel, livery stable, a bowling alley, bath houses, churches, schools, parks, a band and orchestra, ice rink, and over 100 houses.
In 1923, Henry Ford bought the struggling town of Pequaming and turned it into a model town (like Alberta); he established a vocational school in his summer home (to be used during the school year), and also opened four one-room elementary and intermediate schools in September, 1935. In 1937, the company built a high school. However, a shortage of truck tires and increased shipping costs prompted the company to close the mill on October 9, 1942. The Ford Motor Company sold Pequaming in 1952. Early buildings still in existence today include the water tower, the company store, Henry Ford’s summer home and guest house (the “Bungalow”), several houses, and the ruins of the sawmill powerhouse. Pequaming had four elementary schools as of 1940. A high school also existed in Pequaming, with a boardinghouse for the students. Today the area boasts many new homes and summer residences. The schoolhouse in Pequaming is currently under private ownership.
Stonefield, located at 12195 County Road VV outside Cassville, Wisconsin, was the 2,000-acre estate of Wisconsin’s first governor, Nelson Dewey. Much of the original estate has been separated into Nelson Dewey State Park and the Stonefield historic site, an expansive museum operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society. The historic site takes advantage of the large property by offering several different areas for visitors, including an early Wisconsin farmhouse, a re-created agricultural village built to resemble those common around 1900, and a reconstruction of Nelson Dewey’s home. In 1953, the reconstr ucted Dewey household was set aside from the state park for use as a museum operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Originally the “State Farm and Crafts Museum,” the interior of the rebuilt Dewey home would later be furnished as Dewey’s original house and serve as a house museum interpreting Dewey’s life.
In 1954, the historical society began plans to accompany the Dewey house with a replica of the sort of rural farming village and farmstead that would have been typical in Wisconsin in around 1900. Work continued on these projects into the 1970s as buildings and objects were added to the site. Today the Stonefield village includes over thirty buildings, including a blacksmith shop, general store, schoolhouse, and other stores and social institutions. Some of these buildings are authentic historic structures that were relocated to Stonefield for use in the village. The remainder were built as replicas. Near the village, the Stonefield farmhouse offers visitors a glimpse into the lives of Wisconsin farm families during the early 20th century. Many of the buildings in the village and farmstead are staffed by costumed interpreters who help guide visitors through the site.
Stonefield is also home to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Museum, which features a large collection of antique farm equipment. In 1969, the State Agricultural Museum was added to the features at the historic site. On May 19, 1970, Stonefield, also known as the Nelson Dewey Plantation, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Home to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Museum, and recreated 1901 Farmstead and Village, Stonefield shares the story of the agricultural communities that cultivated Wisconsin’s growth.
The Alberta Village Museum is located at 21235 Alberta Avenue (Old US Highway 41) in L’Anse Township on the west side of US-41 in Alberta, MI. Alberta is an unincorporated community in L’Anse Township of Baraga County near the city of Baraga in the state of Michigan. It is situated on US Highway 41 about eight miles south of the village of L’Anse. Alberta is the site of the Ford Forestry Center and Research Forest, managed by the Michigan Technological University School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science. This unique village community with its sawmill was built by Henry Ford in the midst of his Northern Forest holdings. It was founded in 1936 after Ford declared the banks of the Plumbago Creek to be an ideal spot for a sawmill. Ford named the town “Alberta” after the daughter of the superintendent of Ford’s Upper Peninsula Operations at the time, which was either Fred J. Johnson or Edward G. Kingsford (for whom the town of Kingsford, Michigan and Kingsford charcoal is named).
Henry Ford wanted to create a planned community that offered workers an affordable and pleasant place to live. Ford’s intention was to have a model lumber and sawmill town, as well as to construct a plant in the southeastern forests of the Keweenaw. It was to become one of his Village Industries, which were common in Lower Michigan. At the time Ford established Alberta, wood was used extensively in automobiles. The original village of Alberta consisted of twelve houses, two schools, and a steam-driven mill built to the most modern standards of the day. The museum has Henry Ford’s first home built for this village and used as his payroll office, which is currently used as the Gift Shop. Among the original buildings in the town is a pair of one-room schools (one school was for students up to the fourth grade and the other school was for students up to the eighth grade). In 1954, the Ford Motor Company donated the town, saw mill, and the surrounding timber lands to Michigan Technological University for use in its growing Forestry program. The grounds are open to the public Monday – Saturday.from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. mid-June through October (spring-fall).
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