This is the 20th anniversary of my first multi-day trip to photograph Iowa highway signs. I spent the first half of spring break cooped up to pump out an important class paper, then set out amid gray skies and brown ground. Because of the Second Great Decommissioning, many photos I took on this trip cannot be reproduced today. I have revisited many locations, but the signs are gone.
Mostly in 2016-17, but not wrapping up until recently, I posted a series of photos of closed Iowa schools. I went with one per county, in reverse alphabetical order, because that’s a particular idiom of mine. (Who are you calling an idiom? — Ed.) I cheated with Zero and Quarry, but here’s the rest:
Yarmouth, Exira (demolished), Wyman, Vincent (demolished), Ute, Thornton (demolished), Swan, Rake (demolished), Pilot Mound, Otranto, Numa, Moneta, Lovilia, Kellogg, Jamaica, Irwin, Hamburg, Gladbrook (demolished), Fenton, Eldora (demolished), (bonus Elma [demolished]), Dumont, Coburg, and Beaver.
Now, we end where it began. Sort of.
March 21, 2003/September 10, 1919: “The town of Ayrshire is putting itself on the map. A consolidated school building is to be built and they are thinking seriously of having an electric light plant in the town. The little burg also boasts of a resident lawyer and a dentist.” — Spencer Reporter
The IA 314 page has a collection of photos of the Ayrshire school building as it was in 2003 and 2016. To quote myself from the page, this stop made me realize that there were far more towns in Iowa with old schools than I was aware of. It also made me think that someone needs to be taking photos of them for history, and I could be that person, or at least one of them.
Since 2003, Dave and Barb Else have done a book on this. I’m sure the two guys from Nebraska have multiple school photos on their related Facebook pages. The Forgotten Iowa Facebook page went inside the Ayrshire building and extensively documented it. Note that the name over the doors is Silver Lake Township.
I have also turned this interest into a timeline of Iowa school changes, consolidations, and closures. A significant batch of information was released in a series of blog posts in 2021, originally working backward: 1960-65, 1960s multi-high-school rural districts, 1966-67, 1968-70 with compilations, 1971-74, 1975-79, 1980-84, 1985-89, 1990s, 21st century, and information gleaned from Iowa Department of Education building databases. I’ve put in many more updates since, traceable via the Schools category, and there could be a School History category in the future, although it might take a while.