One-Room Schoolhouses
Did you know there are at least three former schoolhouses still standing in Inver Grove Heights?
In a past post, I explained how Inver Grove Heights Schools (ISD 199) used to be...well, a lot of different school districts, each centered on a rural school that educated students until 8th grade, then sent them to South St. Paul High School.
While the highlight tends to be "building Simley Junior-Senior High--as well as Salem Hills (1953), Pine Bend (1958), South Grove (1961), additions to and eventually a new Inver Grove (1965), and the second Hilltop (1968)--part of this project is taking stock of our historic school sites across Inver Grove. Some, like the old District #10 (Lake Park) school, are hiding in plain sight!
A Note on Sources
A good deal of the source material for this project begins with Lois Glewwe's 1990 book A History of Inver Grove Heights. In chapter seven (all the way on page 282!!!), she documents the history of one-room schoolhouses through Simley's construction in 1960 and the completion of Hilltop in 1968. Her work in invaluable, particularly on the old records of the original 1850s schools in Inver Grove Village (on Concord by the Swing Bridge), Pine Bend (at 117th near the Rosemount border), and Salem (near Babcock and Upper 55th).
There are a few errors and omissions: South Grove opened in 1961, not 1964, and there's just a brief mention of the various expansions to Simley like the 1963 construction of the north wing of the original square buildings, the addition of the pool and D building, and the new construction in 1971.
It's my hope to acknowledge the 1881 History of Dakota County a little more explicitly that past works have, and to bring in some great sources like a 1976 history of Inver Grove Elementary and District #7, held by the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul (pictured at the right).
Finding the Buildings
One of the goals of this project, though, is engaging the Inver Grove Heights community in actually remembering and preserving our history! And so, last week, we put letters in the mail to property owners who own land that, at one point, had an old structure that served as a school in one of the districts that would join to become ISD 199 or is found within Inver Grove Heights's borders.
A note on methods: ISD 199 does not include Inver Grove Heights west of Robert Trail or much of the city southwest of Highway 55, particularly Rich Valley. For the time being, though, we are including public schools outside present-day ISD 199 boundaries but within or historically connected to those of present-day Inver Grove Heights.
District #9 (Rich Valley): 1 standing, 1 gone
After a schoolhouse on the grounds of nearby St. Patrick's Church (where St. Patrick's Cemetery is today) burned down in 1871, residents built the District 9 schoolhouse in its place. The one-room schoolhouse, along with accompanying storage and outhouses (not pictures), stood at the corner of Rich Valley Boulevard and 105th Street.
As class sizes grew, though, the one-room schoolhouse aged poorly. In 1936, with the help of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration, Dakota County spent over $22,000 (about $500,000 today) to construct three rural schoolhouses in Empire, Greenvale, and Inver Grove Township. For those of you familiar with Rich Valley Park, that gave us this building:
The Rosemount school district absorbed District 9 in the late 1950s, and this building fell into disuse. It still stands today, one of the targets for a quixotic project to create a historic village near the Heritage Village Park on 66th and Concord.
But what of the old 1871 schoolhouse? As of Glewwe's writing in 1990, it stood to the west across Rich Valley Boulevard, where owner Ted Christian personally moved it and used it as an out-building. Since then, though, I've received notice from the owners of the property that the building, which had fallen into disrepair, has been demolished. (This will be a theme, and there shouldn't be judgment on that or any particular homeowner: these buildings were over a century old, not preserved, and similar structures exist in places like the Dakota City historic village at the Dakota County Fairgrounds in Farmington.)
Instead, what remains is the 1936 schoolhouse, and it's an intriguing possibility for future iterations of this project. One of my white whales is getting into the old District 9 schoolhouse and, in a perfect world, helping ISD 199 and Dakota County Historical Society design programming like that of the one-room schoolhouse in the Wisconsin county where I teach:
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Something fun to help us do that?
At the Minnesota Historical Society, I managed to track down pupil lists and schoolbook records from the District 9 schoolhouse, which would allow students and staff to reenact this as accurately as possible.
One thing at a time, though.
District #10 (Lake Park): 1 standing
Before Pine Bend Elementary, there were actually two schools in southern Inver Grove: District 21, a one-room schoolhouse near present-day Pine Bend Cemetery, and District 10, a one-room schoolhouse along present-day Inver Grove Trail. (The newly-formed Inver Grove-Pine Bend Independent School District 199 also included the former Hill Top school, District 103, dissolved in 1956.) With all these new pupils in a growing district, District 21 (and then 199) was able to pass school bonds to build Pine Bend.
So what did they do with the old District 10 school?
District 199 eventually sold it, and it was refurbished as a family home. In 1983 John Rue brought the property and began renovating both the former schoolhouse section as well as building an addition onto the front, where the little porch is pictured above. John recalled the four posts of the porch addition and the narrow glass-pane windows, which he removed in the process of making the home livable for the 1980s.
Little remains of the old school besides the beveled blocks used in the foundation, which are still there but have been painted over. But John recalls the look of the old schoolhouse, the materials--including full 2x4s and old square nails in the building--and had his own connections to Simley, to Pine Bend across the street, and this project.
District #8 (Glassing School): 1 gone
I hadn't planned to give an update here! Literally as I was writing this at 3pm on Tuesday the 16th, Jan Glassing called me to update me on the old District #8 one-room schoolhouse, which stood on the Glassing farmland south of the intersection of Babcock Trail and 70th St E. (Today, Glassing Florist sits on the southwestern corner of their original 160-acre homestead.)
District 8 consolidated with Salem School District #3 in 1950, and the one-room schoolhouse, out of use after 1940, is long gone.
But that doesn't mean there aren't still stories to tell! Though she's not from Inver Grove originally, Jan had some stories to tell about how her husband Joe (Fred Glassing Jr.) and his father (Fred Sr.) recalled hauling water to the schoolhouse for drinking and washing hands. Later, too, when the building was "used for storage" by Glassing Florist, as Glewwe notes, it was also used for flocking Christmas trees! Joe worked that job when he wasn't in school, Jan recalled, making "all crazy" colors in the late 1950s. Glassing put a big door in the south side of the building to bring trees and equipment in and out of the building, too.
District #3 (Salem): 1 standing...I'm pretty sure
This is one I'm waiting back to hear on -- much like Joe's house, I'm fairly sure this old schoolhouse, which was Salem Elementary before the new structure (just the northeast quadrant of it today) was built in 1953.
One of the challenges of this project, though, is getting those stories while respecting people's space. I'm not going door-to-door and imposing upon people, so instead I am writing letters to each family on ISD 199 letterhead, asking them if the structure is still standing and if they have any memory or memorabilia from it. (Thanks to my fifth-grade teacher at Pine Bend, Mrs. Molda, for teaching me how to write a formal letter.)
One of our goals, in our final product, is to have an updated exhibit here on the Inver Grove History website with a map where you can explore each of the schools built throughout the district's history. (That includes buildings not mentioned here: two iterations of Inver Grove District #7, at a pair of sites along present-day River Road; the old Hill Top District #103, at 76th and Cahill; Pine Bend District #21, a brick structure in the Pine Bend Cemetery; and the Barnes Ave School District #73, the second-to-last one-room schoolhouse left in Dakota County.1 None of those buildings remain today.)
The Stories
One of the great things about talking to John, who owns the District 10 schoolhouse, was learning that not only did his two kids attend Simley, but he was a 1976 grad himself who lived in the South Grove development as it was first being built. He described living next to longtime football coach and math teacher Don Roberts, and recalled that his dad would join fishing trips to Manitoba with Roberts and fellow teachers like Ed Mergens, Dick Vaerst, Terry Blummer, and others. He remembered being a 7th grader in the halls of Simley when it was a joint Junior-Senior High, recalling how intimidating it was to walk past high school seniors.
Jan Glassing, recalling the District 8 schoolhouse and the Glassing family's connection to it, talked about the sense of community around District 8 and, later, District 3, along with other community institutions like the Old Salem Church. In an era before "third spaces" and half-price apps at Applebee's and all sorts of other technologies and distractions, it's a powerful reminder of how big--and yet how small-town--Inver Grove used to be...or is?
Those stories are great! Listening to the are part of an upcoming phase, where we plan to reserve some time and space at a local school and record your memories of these buildings -- pictures of children outside the school; memories of walking five miles, uphill, both ways; or just any knowledge of these sites, their use, and your connection to Inver Grove history. If you have any connection to those specific sites, you can email the project team at simleyhistory [at] gmail [dot] com.
Stay tuned!
Cory Haala
July 16, 2024
1 I know. I'm sorry! But it's true. David Schreier's 2003 Picturing the Past: Events That Shaped Dakota County in the Twentieth Century (p. 128) revealed that District 438, in Vermillion, dissolved in July 1963. District 73, now a demolished one-room schoolhouse at 8855 Barnes Trail, was absorbed into ISD 199 in October 1960 on the district's second attempt at dissolution. The first vote, in September 1960, ended in a 23-23 tie, with all 46 eligible voters casting a ballot.