Little Red School House being updated
Since its construction in 1838, the Little Red School House in Butler has become even redder from people repainting its bricks to better resemble its name — which has actually damaged the brick that made the school red in the first place.
Butler’s original one-room schoolhouse is undergoing a renovation to replace the mortar holding the original bricks together, and also update the roof and other exterior features of the building.
Jen Ford, director of the Butler County Historical Society, said the late C. Timothy Shaffer, a former state senator and district judge, willed the society “a six-figure amount” upon his death, which the organization is using to renovate the Little Red School House. Additionally, the Daughters of the American Revolution gave the society $9,000 meant for use on the Little Red School House.
According to Ford, the renovation would not be possible without these donations, and they are intended to make the one-room schoolhouse into somewhat of a museum showcasing the educational beginnings of Butler.
“It’s very exciting,” Ford said Wednesday, May 1. “In 1838 it was big enough to accommodate all the students in Butler … as time went on, it got outgrown.”
The building is one of, if not the, oldest one the You Name It Contracting crew has worked on, and Mark Edwards, a partner with the company, said workers are trying to keep the replacement materials period-appropriate. He said the crews are deliberately keeping the building’s vintage look.
“The exterior has been modernized a little bit,” Edwards said. “As far as bricks go, brick is brick; whether it’s 1838 brick or 2022 brick. We patina-ed our mortar a bit so it doesn’t look so stark and bright.”
While the schoolhouse was only a school until the 1870s, Ford said the school district would use the building as administrative offices and even as a nurses’ station into the 1900s.
With exterior renovations in progress, Ford said the next project for the historical society is gathering materials collected from the schoolhouse to display for the public. She said throughout the school’s operation from 1838 to the 1870s, students would drop supplies that would fall through the floor boards and under the building. Members of the society collected some of those materials, which will be used to demonstrate school life in the 19th century.
“We’ll have explanations with little boxes with facts in them,” Ford said. “A lot of school supplies, but also tons of marbles, a couple of coins, pencils, a lot of slate that you wrote on … Also a lot of personal objects that were taken into the space.”
The crew from You Name It Contracting will be on site for the rest of the week, and Ford said she hopes to have the building staffed by a volunteer docent twice a month in the summer so people can visit it.
“Right now it’s not open, and that’s just not right,” Ford said. “Once upon a time there was a very active docent corps, who would host mainly schoolchildren, and they would go over there and experience what it was like to take class in a one-room schoolhouse.”
