Sunday, January 16, 2011

Maynard School


I started working on remodeling the Maynard School house this week. It is a one room school house built sometime in the mid 1800's. We use the building as a township meeting hall. It isn't currently being used as a school house although several of the township members went to school there.
The building is 22' wide and about 30' long. It is divided in
four parts with a wall about 6' back that contains three rooms: A middle entry area and two closets to either side. There is a view inside one of the closets in the first picture.
the building has lot of leaky windows and no insulation, which has made it hard to warm the building up for meetings and elections, which are it's primary uses.
The building still has some of the old school desks and the original slate blackboard(which we hope to put back up). As we tore the board off there was another smaller board under it which seemed to have a thin black coating on they were able to use chalk on. This board had a few people's
names on it and the date of November 1901. I assume that might be the day it was covered with the other slate.
I will continue to take pictures of the destruction of the interior walls and keep you posted on its progress. I plan on having some more details and maybe stories from people who went there to school.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. It has a school bell that works. I know cause I climbed into attic and rang it. I could almost see the kids running to school as it rang out. Not too many school bells are still hanging in their respective school buildings so this is a great find.
The old piano you can see in one of the pictures I am afraid is beyond repair at least musically. Unless someone really dedicated to spending the kind of money it would take to fix it loved doing it. It is probably not worth doing much to. So far I have mostly been covered by the dirt and animal debris falling on me as I strip the walls down to the bare frame inside. Getting this building animal proofed and structurally good will be a lot of work, but a fun job. I took a short video of it and will post that separately in next blog.
Mountain girl, logging out.

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