For a while now, I have been basing what I know about the Blairsburg school building on a student newspaper article. However, it turns out some of it was faulty, but in a potentially interesting way: I knew that its pitched roof made it old, but it’s slightly older than estimated before.
“There is a current trend of writing up one’s family tree and searching for one’s roots,” said a story December 1, 1977, in “The Trojan’s Lance”, the Northeast Hamilton student page in the Webster City Daily Freeman-Journal. That trend sprang from the success of Alex Haley’s book Roots and the TV series based on it. “After the first building of the Blairsburg school burned down, a new brick one was built, in 1913. The following year it became Blairsburg Consolidated which took some of the students from the country.”
The last sentence is correct: By a 97-27 vote on Valentine’s Day 1914 (Webster City Journal, Feb. 5 and 19), the Blairsburg school district expanded to cover 26 square miles. The sentence before it is wrong. I hadn’t had any reason to dispute it, because 1913 would have been the very end of the pitched-roof era. Then I discovered the Hamilton County IAGenWeb page had a photo it dated 1911 where the building looks to be in the final stages of construction. That photo is facing west, taken in the area that was used for an addition to Northeast Hamilton school in 2009-10. I went back to the Hamilton County newspaper archives and searched a little farther back.
From the Williams Wasp, a very interesting name for a paper:
Friday night at about 11 o’clock the Blairsburg school house burned to the ground. The exact cause of the fire is unknown, but it is thought the flames started from a defective flue. … The fire was discovered by a sled load of young people returning home from a party. (January 20, 1910)
School opened Monday, Nov. 21, in the new school building which is just completed. … Blairsburg can now boast of one of the neatest and most up-to-date school houses for a town of its size in Iowa. (November 23, 1910)
This information means the Blairsburg school started in the 1910-11 school year, and is in the middle of its 113th year. With this new information, I’ve tweaked some stuff on previous blog posts.
UPDATE: Just when I thought I had figured out a tidy window for architectural changes, here comes the Weldon school, built with a pitched roof and bell tower in 1918 (IAGenWeb). It replaced one that burned down on April 12, 1917 — three days after Traer’s did. Interestingly enough, on June 4, 1917, both Weldon and Van Wert voted bonds for new schools, but Van Wert’s was built in the flat-roofed symmetrical style.