District No. 44 School

About this property

District No. 44 School is a historic one-room school in Taylor Township, Minnesota, United States. It was built in 1891 and used until 1954. The school building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011 for having local significance in the theme of education. It was nominated for being a well-preserved example of the one-room schoolhouses once common in rural Traverse County. District No. 44 School is a one-story frame building on a concrete block foundation. The central room is about 26 feet (7.9 m) by 18 feet (5.5 m). Projecting from the front of the building is a 6-by-12-foot (1.8 by 3.7 m) vestibule. At the rear is an 8-by-12-foot (2.4 by 3.7 m) coal shed, added in 1914. The main room and the vestibule each have a gable roof while the rear section has a simple shed roof. Asphalt shingles cover all three. The school's main section is topped by a small belfry at the front and a concrete block chimney at the rear. The building has wood clapboard siding, painted white. The primary entrance is centered on the vestibule. There are three sash windows on either side wall of the main room and a single narrow window on either flank of the vestibule. As of 2011 the school's interior has been preserved and restored to show its original function. The vestibule contains coathooks and a few shelves for students' lunchboxes, as well as a wash basin. Early-to-mid-20th-century desks, wood benches along the sidewalls, and the original blackboards from 1891 still decorate the classroom. The wood floor and wainscoting are original to the building, while the upper walls and ceiling were modified in the 20th century. At the head of the classroom the teacher's desk is an antique from a different school, acquired in recent years, but behind it is the school's original map cabinet with maps dated 1892. Nearby is a fuel oil stove, which replaced an earlier coal-burning stove. A door in the north wall leads to the coal shed, which also contains a narrow cabinet once used to store art supplies. The rear of the classroom includes a cabinet added in the 1920s to house the school's library. A ceiling hatch nearby leads to an attic space, which includes a rope bell pull for the belfry. Neither of the original two outhouses has survived, and the outhouse presently standing to the east of the school is a more recent structure not considered a contributing property to the National Register listing. Little specific information survives regarding the initial establishment of District No. 44 School. The number 44 had been used previously for a Traverse County school district, but it is unclear if it was located in Taylor Township or elsewhere before closing sometime prior to 1888. In 1891, however, an act of legislature reassigned the number to a new school to be built in Section 8 of Taylor Township. At that time the township had a population of 263 people. The building materials were delivered to the site but, for lack of available carpenters, hadn't been assembled as of mid-November that year. The little school was definitely complete and operating by April 1892, though, when the county's school superintendent wrote about how well it was progressing.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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