Every once in a while for a long time I would check the Eldora newspaper’s website to see if there was any progress on demolition of the 1916-17 school building. Nothing kept happening, so I let it slide. But after the Gladbrook school finally came down this summer, I thought about it again.
It was demolished earlier this year, according to news story snippets from late March and mid-June. Both the Eldora Herald-Ledger and Iowa Falls Times-Citizen websites only display a few sentences before a paywall kicks in, but that was enough for me to see…
HEY THAT’S MY PICTURE!! A photo of the side of the school with all the windows boarded up, taken in 2015, was posted on this blog in April 2017 and printed in the Times-Citizen on March 23 without my knowledge. Eldora Historical Society, would you like to explain yourself?
Based on a T-C snippet and Iowa Department of Education building lists, it looks like I was a year off on the beginning of Eldora-New Providence and Hubbard-Radcliffe starting sharing as South Hardin, so that has been corrected in the timeline to 2007. Based on a snippet from the H-L in May, the gym continued to be used after the school was closed. It was built in 1958-59, according to an application to get Eldora’s downtown on the National Register of Historic Places, and the minimal connection between the two structures would have permitted continued use.
(I didn’t intend to write about two cases of reproduction-without-notification, but they just happened to crop up within a few-day span.)