I see a lot of old schoolhouses on my travels around the Great Lakes State but I have not seen many that are made from logs. The Becking School stands with a collection of historic log buildings in Bad Axe’s Pioneer Log Village. The Becking School was built in 1895 and the first teacher was Fred Linton who was paid $20.00 per month. It was moved to the log village in the 1980s along with the other buildings from around Huron County.

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This old school house sits in School Section Lake Veterans Park. It is a Mecosta County park near the town of Mecosta.

Issac Berry was born a slave in 1831. He escaped from bondage in Missouri and made his way to freedom in Canada in 1858. There he married Lucy Millard. The Berrys moved to Morton Township in 1877 with other black and multi-racial families. They bought cutover land and Isaac served as the postmaster, blacksmith and school director. Lucy became the Little River Schools first teacher.

The original school was a one-room, log schoolhouse built in 1877. The current school still standing in the park was constructed in 1905. It was the local school and community center until 1935. The Berry family landscaped the property around the lake, including the beach, calling it Pleasant View. They sold it to Mecosta County for a park after Lucy Berry’s death.

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This little schoolhouse stands a few miles south of Hastings. From 1872 to 1963 Hope Township children attended school in this building, known as the Hinds School because of its location at the crossroads community of Hinds Corners. The school had stood vacant for almost twenty years when Robert Casey, a Hinds student during the 1930s, purchased it in 1981. Casey (1928-1997), a teacher here and in Hastings, restored the building as a place for children to visit.

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The small town of Leonidas north of Colon has one of the most unique school buildings in Michigan. The shape of the building is a rather ordinary square but it is adorned on the outside with ornately placed fieldstone. The school was constructed in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s Civil Works Administration. The building was built by two local stonemasons Charlie Blue and Laverne Harmon. They were acclaimed fieldstone builders who were well known in Southern Michigan from the 1920-1950s. The stones came from local farm fields and they were placed on the outside of the building. The patterns on the outside are beautiful and it is amazing to see in person.

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This old schoolhouse near Ionia is believed to be the oldest schoolhouse still standing in Michigan. The Sessions School was built in 1847 with local fieldstone by Alanzo Session, a New York school teacher who moved to the Ionia area. He built the school on his property to educate the local children. Session’s house is gone, but the old schoolhouse still stands in the northern part of the Ionia State Recreation Area.

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This brick one-room schoolhouse near the Canton Township Offices was constructed in 1884 by Hargreaze Sittlington. ( you gotta love people’s interesting names back in the day ) The school boasts beautiful brickwork and arches over the doors and windows. The school closed in 1954. In 1977, the school district donated it to the Canton Historical Society, which restored the building and opened it as a museum in 1982.

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I saw this old schoolhouse somewhere near Evart. It looks as if someone has started fixing it up but it has a long way to go yet. It amazes me how many old schoolhouses I see across Michigan and it is nice that some of them have been saved and restored. I am thinking students today have no idea of what it was like a century ago long before technology.

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West of Canton is this white painted brick schoolhouse. A historical marker stands nearby and reads:

In 1876 this Italianate schoolhouse replaced a log school, built in 1836 and known officially as Canton Fractional No. 1 School. In 1944 Henry Ford, who operated a small factory in Cherry Hill, paid for an addition to this building, as well as for the salary for a second teacher. The school became part of Ford’s Greenfield Village School System where students benefitted from art, music, and dance curricula. Cherry Hill School was absorbed by the Plymouth School District in 1955.

What the marker does not mention is that the small Ford factory in Cherry Hill mainly hired workers that were disabled. Many of them veterans of WWII. At one time Ford had employed 12,000 disabled workers at Cherry Hill and provided living quarters, education and career training.

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