Decades of dust and exhaust cake the stone trim. Faded paint peels off the walls. The land is at least as valuable as the decaying structure. Thousands of dollars would have to be poured into the walls, ceilings, roofs to make these buildings usable. Who could want the old one- and two-room schoolhouses, except perhaps for storage?
Jo Anne Keeney had an answer in Oak Lawn. In Romeoville, it was businessman Jack Prehn. Ameritech Mobile Communications Inc. executives and chamber of commerce members devised a unique response in Orland Park.
Where some saw dollar drain and decay, these people, and others like them, saw ghosts of a treasured past: students baking potatoes for lunch on the classroom stove, fetching water from a nearby farm, feeding corncobs to the fire for heat, learning multiplication tables from a friend`s sister.
Occasionally abandoned, sometimes destroyed, these former bastions of open classroom learning were shelved as school districts merged and needs changed in the 1950s and `60s.
Low, sprawling, multiclassroom buildings were in. Decorative brick, molding, high ceilings, maple floors, oak staircases were out. Indoor plumbing and forced air heat in. Franklin stoves, coal-burning furnaces, chemical bathrooms or outhouses definitely out.
So what do village trustees or school boards do with an aging white frame or red brick educational elephant? They turn to the 3 Rs, of course: recycle, rethink, reuse.
Last summer was countdown time for Oak Lawn`s Cook School (until 1939 known as Oak Lawn School), a half-block north of 95th Street on Cook Avenue. Built in 1906 as a two-classroom building, the school had been enlarged twice to handle a growing enrollment. But students were long gone. So was the series of tenants that followed.
Trustees for the village, which had bought the school from Oak Lawn/
Hometown Elementary School District 123 in 1966, viewed Cook School repair as a budget buster. They envisioned a parking lot. Resident Jo Anne Keeney, an art teacher, viewed Cook as a historic treasure. She envisioned a bustling, useful building. ”Years of history was going to be gone,” Keeney said.
Cook School`s demolition date was set for June 30, 1991. On June 26, village officials changed their minds.
”Jo Anne Keeney was really the person who threw herself in front of train,” said Ernie Nance, Oak Lawn Park District director.
Under pressure from Keeney and her band of preservationists, the village agreed to a land swap with the park district. Cook School was to become the park district headquarters.
”The building fits the bill,” said Nance. ”It`s downtown near the library and village hall. And it`s time we had a permanent home. The park board has moved around so much.” Financial arrangements are under way to renovate, pending budget approval by the park board. Costs for the first-floor work are estimated at $667,000.
”The school was built by and for the people of Oak Lawn. It will still be here after I`m gone,” Keeney said.
Recycling old schoolhouses has become a habit in nearby Orland Park. Two such structures have found new life as offices within the past five years.
Ameritech`s need for a mobile communications tower elicited little sympathy from Orland Park trustees. But the danger facing Orland Park`s version of the little red schoolhouse changed their minds.
Old Orland Center School was scheduled to bite the dust. Classes had not been held there since 1966. Once farmland, the one-acre school site was losing ground to ever-widening roads. The pounding traffic at 151st Street and 94th Avenue had edged to within a couple of feet of the little red brick school, circa 1917, destroying its building and foundation.
”The building was doomed,” said Thomas Pauley, superintendent of Orland School District 135. It was 1986 and plans were in motion to replace the little schoolhouse with an administrative center by 1989.
To the rescue rode Ameritech Mobile Communications Inc. and the Orland Park Chamber of Commerce. Ameritech executives had failed to obtain permission to construct a monopole antenna for its cellular phone system. The company also wanted a communications center and the chamber needed a permanent home.
”We were sharing an office and needed more space,” said Barbara Steen, chamber director. ”We also needed an identity. No one knew where to find the chamber. We were always moving. Now we say we`re in the little red schoolhouse,” Steen said.
With help from the school district and pressure from the historical society, a deal cut in preservation heaven settled Old Orland Center School`s future.
Ameritech moved the little schoolhouse a mile down the road to the Jerling Junior High School campus, 8851 W. 151st St. There the company renovated the exterior, set it on a new foundation, moved its computers into the basement and built a fenced-in tower out back.
Chamber members began a major renovation upstairs in exchange for a $1 a year lease. But this was not just a revarnish-the-floor type of restoration. Old Orland Center School was built by the book-that is, the Standard Elementary Schools of Illinois guide published by Illinois Department of Public Instruction.
And the book was very specific: ”The wainscotting should be a chocolate brown, the walls up to the border should be a light green, no darker than a robin`s egg. The border and ceiling should be a cream color.”
”What really amazed me was the building had to be facing a certain direction. And the paint had to be a certain color,” Steen said. Steen keeps a copy of particularly interesting sections of the book`s seventh edition, published in 1920.
Then there was the book`s coat room description: ”Separate coat rooms for boys and girls are essential. Girls especially need a place where they may be safe from molestation.” The coat rooms are still there, now serving as bathrooms.
Pauley saw the deal as a happy combination of interests.
”The simple fact was that under no circumstances did the district have the money to restore and rebuild it. Ameritech is happy now. The chamber is happy. And we were able to keep our educational heritage alive,” said Pauley. Richard Connor Riley, an attorney who helped negotiate the deal for Ameritech, called it ”a win, win, win” situation. ”I`m glad it was saved. We just don`t save enough of our history and our past,” Riley said. It also led to a win situation for Riley.
While working on the little red schoolhouse deal, Riley learned that the district owned an even older, smaller schoolhouse: Yunker School.
A tiny (24-by-34-foot) white schoolhouse, complete with bell tower, columns, flag pole and outhouse, it charms people driving by the corner of 143rd Street and Wolf Road in Orland Park.
Once inside, its dollhouse image gives way to expansive, airy space and a staircase stretching heavenward.
”It fools the eye. People gasp when they walk in,” Riley said of what is now his new office.
Built in 1909 and opened in 1910, the building features cement block made to look like stone, an ornate columned porch and a bell tower.
Riley was interested in doing something with the building, but the place was a mess. ”I told the board the land was worth a lot of money but the school would be bulldozed,” he said.
Riley offered an alternative: The school would be auctioned but he would draft a restricted deed so that if the building were sold it couldn`t be torn down. ”It had to remain a schoolhouse on the outside,” Riley said.
”Other people were interested but they didn`t bid, for which I am eternally grateful,” Riley said. ”I bought it at $35,000, but I put a tremendous amount of work and money into the building.
”Some people claim it was a steal, but what I paid for the building I exceeded by 600 percent to restore it. Just to make it usable I had to rebuild the west wall and put on a new roof. It was in horrible condition. There was no indoor plumbing until we put it in, in 1990. And it was still a school in 1956.” Local contractor Dennis Burke helped in the effort. Turning a tiny school into spacious offices without knocking down outside walls took a special kind of magic, which, Riley said, Burke possessed. ”He understood what I wanted and could do it.”
The same magic dust at work at Yunker School must have wafted on the wind west to Romeoville in Will County. How else to explain tiny Taylor School`s seemingly endless interior?
A person driving down Illinois Highway 53 in Romeoville could easily miss the almost minuscule, unassuming brown brick structure sitting across the highway from Romeoville High School. It definitely could hold one, maybe two offices. But five? Forget it.
Inside what is now called the Taylor School Office, a handful of rooms surround soaring open space. The project is Jack Prehn`s attempt to save history. Taylor School, built in 1923, had seen its last use as an attendance center by the early 1950s. It later became a residence. In 1989 the building and adjoining old farmhouse went on the market.
”I saw the For Sale sign. I knew a company was buying up the land in the area, and I wanted to save the school,” said Prehn, a longtime Romeoville resident.
Two years and thousands of dollars later, Prehn and partner Craig A. O`Brien moved their Compu Solve computers system business into the renovated gem. Now Prehn plans to recoup some of his cost by leasing the two offices in the loft upstairs and an office downstairs.
Why did he do it? A display case of old spellers, ink wells and other early school artifacts provides a clue. The computer-age businessman cared about the past. ”I wanted to preserve it. It was a knee-jerk reaction,”
Prehn said.
Lincoln School in the Grundy County seat of Morris had no shortage of interior space.
Imagine buying a 5,400-square-foot brick home with 14-foot ceilings. Add maple floors, oak stairs, a prairie-style roof line and entryway. Expensive?
Not if the building is an old two-room schoolhouse marking time as a storage house while waiting for someone to come along and love it.
And not if that someone has the time, energy and know-how to strip 14 coats of paint off the oak railing, paint and refinish walls and woodwork and contact experts for the rest.
Built in 1912, Lincoln School stopped serving students in the early 1970s. Afraid that the school might be razed and the lot subdivided, neighbor James McElvain bought the school when Morris Elementary School District 54 auctioned it off in 1974.
”I wanted to make sure I knew what was going to happen to it,”
McElvain said. After all, his whole family attended the school: he and his brothers and sister in the 1930s and later his son.
Once a comely building at Fremont Avenue and Vine Street, the decaying structure had seen better days. Windows were boarded up. Glass was broken. It needed someone who could see beyond layers of grime to its architectural treasures of transoms, cove ceilings, oak-paneled cloakrooms and stonework.
Its white knights rode up one fall day in 1990 on bicycles, glimpsing the school from the Illinois & Michigan Canal bike path.
The unusual was standard to Chicago-based decorators Alan Wallie and Denis Kruk. Their last house, a converted church, had attracted the media. But Wallie and Kruk were ready for another challenge.
”We had been looking around the country for a place. We didn`t want ordinary. We knew we would know the right place when we saw it,” said Kruk.
Said Wallie: ”We could not find one we really liked. We were accustomed to high ceilings, open space.”
”Then we saw this. Immediately we said that`s it,” Kruk said.
And the two former Chicagoans liked the location: away from urban sprawl with a hassle-free commute to Chicago, near I&M Canal trails and in a neighborhood due for a comeback. Former Illinois Gov. William G. Stratton`s old house is just down the street.
”I think a house like this in a town like Morris will appreciate in value. We felt the potential was here to get more for your money,” Wallie said.
Wallie and Kruk purchased the schoolhouse and its one-acre site for $98,000. Their work had just begun.
It took 25 gallons of stripper and three weeks of elbow grease to work down through the layers of paint to the banister`s bare oak.
The school was built, as were many of the one-room schoolhouses, as a kind of split-level, with a half floor up to classrooms and half floor down to washrooms, storage and an office. Out went the girls` washroom. In went a guest bedroom. Bed and bath suites took over a maze of nooks and corridors.
Upstairs, lofty ceilings would extend a 1,000-square-foot classroom into an almost ballroom-sized vista except for the cleverly placed fireplace unit that helped divide the space into conversational areas. Across the hall, stacks of dishes replaced piles of books.
With the inside near completion, the men are focusing attention on landscaping the barren grounds and building a greenhouse. They have their own ready-made, built-in intercom for summoning whoever is working the garden.
”We`ve restored the buzzer, but we quieted it down with insulation. We didn`t think the neighbors would appreciate the loud blast,” Wallie said.
Garden plans may take awhile. Restoring the schoolhouse to its former glory was wearing.
”It`s been a lot of work,” said Kruk. ”I don`t want to do it again, but I`m thrilled with the renovation. It`s just great. I absolutely love it.” And so do people who attended the school.
”Half the town has gone here,” said Kruk. ”People stop by or stop us on the street to say they or a relative went here. A teacher who taught here thanked and thanked us. She loved the building and wanted to say thanks for caring enough to do something with it.”
And Lincoln School`s former neighbor is happy.
”I`m very pleased. I think it`s being put to good use,” said McElvain.
In a two-room schoolhouse such as Lincoln, a young student`s pranks might possibly be forgotten half-way through school by moving from the lower to the upper grade room. But when there was only one room, good behavior was a necessity.
Not only did the same school marm, as she was often called, teach all eight grades, she often was a relative. Home-school communication was close.
”I didn`t dare act out. The teacher was my aunt,” said John Cronin, who describes himself as middle-aged. He likes to tell what it was like to go to a one-room school: ”It was nice. It was like a family. You knew everyone. And you learned more. The older children were helpful. And what you missed in a lower grade you would pick up later.” Cronin pointed to a front seat. ”That was where I sat.”
In a few minutes Cronin, whose great-great-grandfather built Cronin School in 1863, would be speaking about the school and the good old days to students and teachers from a nearby parochial school. Cronin School is a star attraction at Joliet Junior College, to which it was relocated in 1987 from a field in nearby Shorewood.
The school, which opened in April, 1991, after extensive renovation, is a hit on the field trip circuit.
JJC teacher Jim Shinn figured more than 2,000 visitors have walked through the old schoolhouse since February.
”I never imagined this kind of popularity,” Shinn said.
He and fellow agriculture teacher Dave Cattron had been searching the countryside for a good example of the little old wooden schoolhouse when they heard that Cronin School was used just for storage by the Ed Larkin family. The building, closed as a school in 1950, had been used by Larkin as a residence through the 1960s. The family donated the building to the Joliet Junior College Foundation as a living history museum.
A display case of old spellers and ink wells lines one side of the back wall. Homemade soap and a wash basin stand on the other side. Cattron likes to throw out interesting asides picked up in his schoolhouse research.
”The books say an 11-foot-high ceiling is needed for good health, but all the students drank from one cup,” said Cattron.
A second grade class starts down the path from the college`s agricultural wing to the shady school site. Already recycled as a residence, the schoolhouse has now come full circle.
Students have come back to Cronin School.
