Sebec's Harriman School was built in 1860 and closed in 1933. (Maine Historic Preservation Commission)

Two or three times a year Clarence Langervine and his wife take the car up to the old one-room schoolhouse in Sebec, Maine.

The two of them sit on the porch of the old school, which is now a museum, and wave to passers-by. Langervine, 85, fondly remembers the three years he spent there in the early 1920s as an elementary school student. "We left in the morning on a wagon and on a good day went the half-mile through the woods right to the little schoolhouse," he says.

Built in 1860, the Sebec school served first- through eighth-grade children within a two-mile radius of the central Maine town for more than 70 years. Then in 1933, like many of the thousands of one-room schoolhouses in Maine, it became a social hall for the community. By the late 1960s, it was almost completely forgotten.

"Nobody paid attention to it anymore," says Betty Ellis, who says she's the "head and horses" of the Sebec Historical Society. "When I went inside, it looked like three or four kids got into the attic and were set loose."

When Sebec was a thriving mill town, producing wool and leather goods, it had 11 schools and a population of about 1,300. Now, Ellis says, about 600 people reside there, and the other 10 schools are gone. Determined to save its last one-room schoolhouse, the historical society restored the school to its turn-of-the-century appearance and maintains it as the Harriman School Museum.

 

The Lyndon Center School Museum, in Caribou, Maine, was built as a one-room schoolhouse. (Maine Tourism Board)

Like Sebec, many Maine towns have lost their one-room schoolhouses. Others have been modified into single-family homes. Some—like the last schoolhouse in Edinburg—have been burned down by local fire departments in training exercises. Maine Preservation Executive Director Roxanne Eflin estimates that there is an average of one school left in most townships. "Most have been torn down or have deteriorated," Eflin says.

Because they are disappearing rapidly, the buildings continue to be a focus of state preservation efforts. Today, six to 10 major projects to save one-room schoolhouses are under way in Maine.

The Maine Historic Preservation Commission has never done a survey of how many of the schoolhouses are left in the state—or even how many there once were. But the state's 492 incorporated towns are divided into eight to 10 districts, and each district usually had its own school, says Assistant Director Kirk Mohney.

"There were literally hundreds, if not thousands," of schools, Mohney says. "The one-room school house was the mainstay educational facility throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century," he says. "They are very important to our history."

 

The 1934 Gov. Brann School in Aroostook County closed in 1943. (MHPC)

Sincee their popularity spanned from the end of the Civil War until the beginning of World War II, schoolhouses represent many different styles of architecture. They were typically built on land merely leased to the school district, so when the buildings closed, the land reverted back to the original owner. In most cases, school districts did not have the funds to buy the land, so property owners were left with the choice of converting the structure or ignoring it. Many considered the buildings nuisances or targets for arson and donated them to nonprofit organizations. Eflin says this is how many ended up in the hands of historical societies today.

One example is the 102-year-old Chicopee School in Buxton, which closed in the 1940s. It's the only one of eight Buxton schools still intact; six are now houses, and the other is the local library. Because the fire department owns the land, the schoolhouse must be moved to be saved. Louis Emery, a past president of the Buxton Historical Society, is overseeing the project.

The fire department recently sold the Chicopee School to the historical society for $1 with the stipulation that it would move it by October 2002. The town will move the Chicopee School near another school and create a museum-like setting with programs about the educational opportunities of the past. Emery says the society hopes to have the site open for Maine Heritage Day in the fall of 2003.

"These schools are a way of life," says Emery, who attended grammar school in a one-room schoolhouse. "I remember bringing some wood for the fire and vegetables for a lunch-time stew," Emery says. "It was a great growing-up experience."

This story was originally published on Preservation Online on March 8, 2002.

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