The Mayflower School, now known as Juneau Montessori School, is a historic school building at St. Ann’s and Savikko Streets in the Douglas part of Juneau, Alaska. It is significant as the only surviving historic Native school building in the Juneau-Douglas area. It is also the only Colonial Revival style Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Alaska. The school was built in 1934 by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to serve as a model school for Native children in Alaska. In addition to educational facilities, the school also contained community meeting facilities, including a library, kitchen, and recreation room. The Bureau intended for the school to provide vocational training and to serve as a community center for the Tlingits of Douglas.
The school is a rectangular 2+1⁄2-story wood-frame structure, with a gable roof, and sited in Savikko Park overlooking the Gastineau Channel. It is set on a hillside, and only presents 1+1⁄2 stories to the front. Its main entrance is on the second level, set in a recessed entryway which is flanked by fluted pilasters and topped by a swan pediment. The building served as an educational facility exclusively for Native children until 1940, when it was merged into the Juneau school system. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. Its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 asserts that the school was “a source of great pride to the Douglas Native community” and that it “represents a significant tie with the past for many Douglas Native people.” Since 1994, the building has been used as a Montessori school.
The Papillion Area Historical Society in Papillion, Nebraska, started in 1979 when the Sautter house was saved from demolition while the Hickory Hills neighborhood was being developed. PAHS moved the farmhouse to its current location and started restoration. In 1995, PAHS acquired a one room schoolhouse and moved it to next to the farmhouse in downtown Papillion. Portal School was originally located south of the township of Portal, Nebraska, near Papillion. This tiny building saw many pupils come and go.
The 1890-built school building remained open until May of 1993. However, frequent flooding necessitated the moving of the school, and eventually the entire town was abandoned. The Papillion Area Historical Society purchased this one-room school building for one dollar on November 22, 1995, and moved it to its present location in downtown Papillion. It currently is the meeting place of PAHS, is open by appointment for tours, hosts area fourth grade students for Pioneer Days, Stroll Down Gingerbread Lane, and hosts Santa Claus during Winter Wonderland. Today people can tour the school, but they should be careful, because it’s rumored to be haunted.
Many facts about the historic one-room Mon Louis Island schoolhouse at Coden, Alabama, come from those who experienced its history firsthand, such as Joseph Couture, an Edmundite priest with St. Rose of Lima church and very much involved in the schoolhouse history when the Edmundite Fathers operated the school from 1942 to 1956. The schoolhouse was not always a parochial school. In numerous accountings it is referred to as the county school. A Mobile Daily Register article from 1891 describes an end-of-year student performance moderated by the two school trustees with no mention of nuns or priest. From this description it seems that even in 1891 the school was not a parochial school. However, it seems that through the years the majority of the teachers were Catholics, whether they were lay-teachers or nuns. In 1942, when the Edmundite Fathers invited the nuns to come to teach school, the Mon Louis School was operated by the Mobile County Public School System, as it had been since at least 1926.
The schoolhouse was moved to Shipyard Road in 1926, when the Mobile County Public Schools bought an acre of land from William Collins. The school system bought the land—not the school building—from William Collins. The county school system relocated the schoolhouse building from property near the church to Shipyard Road, where it served as the facility to educate the children of Mon Louis Island and the immediate surrounding areas from 1926 until 1966, when it was permanently closed. The schoolhouse was the only building on that tract of land until Oliver Collins, William’s son, married his wife, Lois, and built his house next door in 1958 on land given to him by his father. In 1969, three years after the county closed the school, Oliver Collins bought the land next door with the schoolhouse on it. His oldest daughter, Karen, states that her father had no real desire for the building; he just wanted more land to have a bigger vegetable garden, as he had grown up living off the land by hunting, fishing, raising cows, and growing his own food.
The Mon Luis Island Schoolhouse Renovation Project (the group uses the spelling “Luis”) was a case of the right people and the right circumstances all coming together to preserve a building that represented an exceptional lifestyle and a unique culture. Elizabeth Collins Duggin, the oldest resident of Mon Louis Island, who was a student, parent, and teacher at the school, donated a parcel of her land in 2017 to serve as the new location for the schoolhouse. Sadly, one year later Mrs. Duggin died at the age of ninety-seven. Generous donations in her memory allowed the most recent move of the building on April 17, 2018, and today, the schoolhouse sits on property owned by the 501(c)3 organization, the Mon Luis Island Schoolhouse Renovation Project. The group has restored 98 percent of the exterior and hopes to restore the interior in the near future.
The neat little Cracker Box School building is located on the grounds of the Pawnee City Museum, where visitors can view 25,000 items on display in 22 buildings and find many unexpected treasure. Exhibits include Dan Whitney’s (Larry the Cable Guy’s) old-style barn with hay mow, an experimental airplane, a genuine log cabin, a library, a genealogy research center, and the home of Nebraska’s first governor. The LeSeur Genealogy Center is the perfect place for people researching their family history. The home and Memorial Library are of the first state governor and later a U.S. Senator Kenneth S. Wherry. Six one-room country schools have been moved to the grounds of the Pawnee City Museum over time. In the Crackerbox School is a collection of photographs of most of the schools in the county.
Originally known as the Free School, the Powell School was Birmingham’s first public school as well as the city’s oldest surviving school. The school was named after Colonel James R. Powell, Birmingham’s first elected mayor and the first president of the Elyton Land Company which founded the city in 1871. In 1873, a group of citizens approached Colonel John T. Terry, who was serving as the city attorney at the time, for help in establishing a free school in order to attract residents to the relatively new city. He approached James Powell with this proposal and secured a plot of land far “out in the country“. Donated by the city, the land was to be used only for the purpose of a free school for white children residing in Birmingham and those within half a mile of the city limits. The school was to be taught by only white teachers. If the land was to be used for any other purpose, the land would revert back to the Elyton Land Company or its successors.
John Terry and Charles Linn, a local banker and an industrialist, began raising funds to build a schoolhouse. When elected Mayor of Birmingham, Powell donated his salary as Mayor for the school’s use, along with fines collected through the Birmingham Police Court. According to legend, Powell took out a loan needed to complete construction using a tailored suit as collateral. Appreciative of this gesture, the children of the school presented Powell with another tailored suit. On March 1, 1874, the Free School, a modest four-classroom brick building, was dedicated. $1.50 fees were charged per year to attend the “free school”, but the fees were reduced gradually in the following years until they were dropped completely. It remained the only public school in Birmingham until 1883 when it became a high school as other public schools for lower grades had been built.
In 1886, a fire damaged the school building and it was declared unsafe. An adjoining lot was purchased and a plan was made for a new schoolhouse. The new school building, named Powell School per John Terry’s suggestion, was completed in 1888 and at the time, was considered “the most modern and the best equipped elementary school in the South”. By 1923 however, the school was considered obsolete according to a study conducted as the building lacked a lunchroom and an auditorium, and was badly overcrowded, but it was noted that it was in much better shape than many other schools in the city. The study recommended adding a gymnasium, an auditorium, and additional classrooms. Following a fire that destroyed the Barker Elementary School in 1941, Henley School’s PTA president Harry Singler labeled Powell and Henley Schools as “firetraps” and suggested that they should be torn down and replaced with a single centralized school building, preferably somewhere downtown near the Powell School. Parents weren’t fond of the idea of having their children share classrooms with other children from the newly-open Central City Housing Project. Others suggested constructing the new school on the site of the Barker School. Instead, the insurance payout from the fire was used to expand the F. D. MacArthur School as well as an addition for the Powell School in 1951 consisting of a lunchroom, an auditorium, and classrooms. The stairwells were also fireproofed and the lighting throughout the building was modernized.
As the building showed signs of disrepair, there were talks of tearing the building down in the 1960s but preservationists argued its historic value, and, in 1969, the brick exterior was sandblasted and the joints were rechinked with new mortar. The building’s future was threatened once more in November, 1980, when a structural evaluation was done on the building due to its declining structural stability. The school board president suggested tearing the building down instead of repairing the aging structure, but thanks to the help of the Birmingham Historical Society, the Board won a grant from the Alabama Historical Commission to help with repairs. The school was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. With the redevelopment of the nearby Metropolitan Gardens housing project, enrollment at the Powell School had dropped by half and a decision was made to close down the school in 2002. There have been many proposals on what to do with the building including converting it into a teaching laboratory and historical archive, converting it into an adult education center, or simply donating the building to a private school, but there was no follow-through on any of these proposals.
On January 7, 2011, a fire began on the third floor of the building causing the roof and upper floors to collapse. Following the fire, there was a dispute over the ownership of the building. Barber Companies, the successors to the Elyton Land Company, argued that since the property was no longer being used as a school, the title should revert back to them, but it wasn’t long after before they signed a quit-claim deed, giving ownership of the property to the city. A property inspector informed the city that the building was not structurally sound enough to be saved, and it was found out that the Board of Education didn’t carry insurance on the building, leaving the city with very few options. Mayor William Bell made the decision to wait six months for a viable rehabilitation plan before proceeding with demolition leaving the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation in charge of forming the plan. In October 2013, the Trust announced plans that a developer of the Park Place Hope VI mixed-income community surrounding the school will be purchasing the school and converting it into apartments. The project was awarded a $3.7 million loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 108 Loan Guarantee Program. That project never did materialize.
In 2023, a plan to save the burned-out and crumbling Powell School, Birmingham’s oldest standing school building on the site of its first school, was approved by the Birmingham City Council when it voted to approve the mayor’s plan to terminate an agreement with the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation to redevelop the property. The Alabama Trust has a contract to sell the property to Harbert Realty, Stewart/Perry Co. and Sloss Real Estate. All three companies involved in the development deal have a history of preserving Birmingham’s historical buildings and will do their best to save what they can. A potential tenant has been identified, a national non-profit organization with a large local presence. The details have not been finalized, but nobody is guaranteeing that it can be saved. In order to get a historic tax credit, the façade and basic structure would have to be preserved. Restoration will require at least a $20 million investment.
Gretna School is a historic school at 722 Church Street in Gretna, Gadsden County Florida. In the late 1800’s the railroad pushed further west into Gadsden County. A settlement was established in Gretna in 1897 by the Humphrey Company. After Gretna was platted as a town in 1905 there was a desire to have a school in the town limits. One of the men who settled the area was W. P. Humphrey. In 1908, he along with his wife Sarah M. Humphrey and J.W. Mahaffey and his wife Addie Mahaffey deeded the land for the school to the Board of Public Instruction for $100.
R.A. Gray, who later became Florida’s longest serving Secretary of State, was a principal here from 1910 to 1911. The building served as a school until 1935. Since the old school was closed, many students and teachers have related experiences and stories in loving memory of their lives at the Gretna School in times of long ago. The school has since been used as a health clinic, town hall, community center, and for church related activities. It has been a part of the history of Gretna from the beginning.
Many lives have been touched by this building and the trustees of the W.P. Humphrey Club, A. Walter Watson, Jr., W.A. Johnson, and Sterling L. Watson are honored to preserve for future generations this monument of the past. On June 10, 2008, the Old Gretna School House was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The Old Gretna School House Marker, Gretna, FL, is located outside the building and was Sponsored by the W.P. Humphrey Club and the Florida Department of State.
Maple Grove Country School Museum, District 17 (a.k.a. Barren or Mumford School)
Table Rock Historical Society
414 Houston St.
Table Rock, NE 68447
Maple Grove Country School was built in 1874
The District 17 school was the Maple Grove School, also known as the Mumford School and originally known as the Barren School because there were no trees there, but by 1906, there were maple trees that had been planted after the school was built. It was east of Table Rock on the southeast 1/4 of Section 2-2N-11E in Pawnee County, Nebraska. In 1965, Clarence Stoneberger, then owner of the land on which the abandoned old school sat, gave the schoolhouse to the Table Rock Historical Society in return for a promise that the schoolhouse be removed, all brush and debris removed, and the site leveled. The Maple Grove School is now the Maple Grove Schoolhouse Museum. It’s now located in Table Rock, on the west side of the Square, and its interior has been restored to look as it would have in the early 20th century. Operated by the Table Rock Historical Society, it includes a lunch box collection inside the Maple Grove school entryway. These types of lunch boxes were common the early 20th century, used by school children and working men alike.
Brick School (Bainbridge District No 4) in Bainbridge Township, Berrien County, Michigan, was built in 1874. It is a red brick structure with 4 large windows on each side (one window is bricked-over), and a single centered front door with large windows on either side. There is some projecting brickwork, in the form of arches above the windows and doors. The arches all have a keystone at their apex. The bricks, mortar, and keystones of Brick School are actually painted red, and the paint job is showing its age, being slightly worn away. The school identification sign above the door reads “Bainbridge School District No 4, 1874”. The bell tower still stands at the front of the roof, with a school bell inside. A wooden sign on the front door reads “HAUNTED HOUSE.” The school closed in 1963. In May 1995, a business named “Brick School Gallery and Gifts” opened in the schoolhouse. Except for the window on the front just under the roof peak, this schoolhouse is very similar to the nearby Bainbridge Center School.
The former Wickford Elementary School building in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, is more than a century old. Also known as the “Wickford El,” the building sits high above the road, looking out onto Wickford Cove in front and Academy Cove in the back. Instead of glass, plywood covers most window frames. The school was shuttered for 17 years and shows its years of disuse. The building had become a burden on the town, needing more maintenance to keep it from falling down. But, after prevailing over a court challenge by its neighbors, developer Paul Boghossian is moving forward with plans to buy the former school from the town and turn it into housing bringing the area back to life.
The project would consist of 55 units. Of those, 37 would be in the Wickford Elementary building; 14 would be in the old theater building across the street; two units would be in a house across the street that would be moved; and two would be in what is currently a garage on the theater building site, although those proposals are still subject to plan revisions. Six of the units would be deed restricted as “affordable” for people making up to 80% of the area median income.
Proposals to convert the former elementary school have been kicking around since 2013, starting with a proposal for residences, which was then withdrawn in 2014. In 2016, another proposal for condos was floated but North Kingstown officials were not comfortable with the plan and canned it in 2018. In 2019, the town put out a request for proposals for something to be done with the school. While residences were encouraged, they were not required.Boghossian said he is waiting for a decision on historic tax credits from the state, due in June, and then they need to go back to town officials for final approval of the project. He said if everything goes as planned, construction would take 18 months and units would open in June 2025.
The second Allenton District Schoolhouse, a big two-roomer that replaced a smaller one-roomer in 1884, is now home to a Montessori School on Tower Hill Road. The South County Montessori School is a state-approved, non-profit, corporation started in 1976 by a group of parents and teachers with the objective of providing the best possible early learning experience for young children in the community. The School has grown from 20 to approximately 80 students, but it has remained loyal to its original goals. The school has expanded beyond pre-school to include children through third grade, in recognition of the continuum which these years represent in a child’s education.
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