September 28, 2015: Locust School, Winneshiek County.
In northern Winneshiek County, closer to the Minnesota state line than Decorah, is the Locust School. It’s a one-room school historic enough to be maintained by the Winneshiek County Historical Society and get a place on the Iowa state map. The marker reads:
“The Locust School was built in 1854 from rock quarried on the Ruffridge farm. The school was in use every year from 1854 to 1960, or 106 years, an Iowa record for continuous service in the same building and location. Several church groups used the school for a meeting place before building their churches. ‘Locust Lane’ post office was west across the road from the school.”
The span may be a little off; a blog post for “Imagine Northeast Iowa” says the school’s final year was 1961-62, making for 108 years. Even so, there’s a much larger problem with this permanent marker: It was obsolete by 1970. Even today, tourism cites this as “an Iowa record for a school building on its original site” and this is wrong.
Locust closed in the last gasp of one-room schools in Iowa, as the state’s final consolidation wave crested. Its location is responsible for the big bite into the east side of the North Winneshiek school district because Locust students went to Decorah instead. That legacy will vanish next year, when North Winn ceases to exist.
But time marches on, and by 2030, Iowa is going to have a big jump in the number of schools whose core buildings will be supercentenarians — 110 years old and up. (Among them: North Tama.)
Locust may be the oldest existing preserved school building in Iowa; I don’t know for sure. But it hasn’t been the longest continuously used building on one site since either 1968 (107 years) or 1970 (109 years), when a new king was crowned … and recent developments are likely to send it sailing into history. But that’s for tomorrow’s blog post.