Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

September 27, 2015: This part of Bellevue Elementary has been a school for 157 years — 65% of the time since U.S. independence. Its construction in 1848 is closer to the late 17th Century than the present day.

A building that has served in some capacity as a school since the Civil War may only have a few years to go if a bond issue passes.

Bellevue Elementary in Jackson County was recognized as Iowa’s oldest active school building in a Des Moines Register article Aug. 31, 1997. (This fact happened to be handy because the story was overshadowed by the news of Princess Diana’s death, and preserved in the Register’s 1999 sesquicentennial book.) At that time, 71 buildings dated to before 1910.

The building was the second permanent structure to serve as the Jackson County Courthouse and, as such, was in the thick of the occasionally dramatic county-seat fights of the mid- to late 19th Century in Iowa. The Jackson County seat bounced from Andrew to Bellevue to Andrew again to Maquoketa, where it stayed after shenanigans that included county officials embezzling money back when that meant physically pilfering cash from the safe. The Bellevue building was the courthouse from 1848 to 1861, when it became a school. Its 107th year of service in education, passing Locust School in Winneshiek County, was 1968.

Last month, the Bellevue school board set a bond referendum to build a new facility adjacent to the existing Bellevue High School, according to Dubuque Telegraph-Herald articles excerpted via Google. The 1848 building would end its service as a school, but the district wants to help preserve it.

Now, how do I find the next oldest active school building…?

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.