WYMORE, Neb. (AP) - The Pleasant View One-Room School in Wymore is something of a time capsule. The interior looks almost the same as it did the day it held a class for the last time.
The walls are covered with a crackled, blue mid-century modern wallpaper, the pull-down map is still hanging where it taught geography lessons, the flag only has 48 stars and the calendar page from December 1959 is still marked with the names of three students whose birthdays were that month.
It’s a building frozen in time, but the Great Plains Welsh Heritage Centre has plans to get the school looking the way it did back when it opened in 1906.
The Beatrice Daily Sun reports that it’s the Heritage Centre’s Fill the Pail campaign and they’re trying to raise $45,000 to get the school back to its original glory and to tell a few stories of the Pleasant View school as well as other one-room schools from around the area.
They’ll start with the plaster walls.
Gwenith Closs-Colgrove, president of the Welsh Heritage Centre, said that they’ve contracted with a restorer from Olsburg, Kansas, to recreate the walls as authentically as possible, down to the lime and horsehair plaster topped with whitewash.
They’re trying to keep things just as they would have been when the school opened. The slate chalkboard at the front of the room still has the hand-written cursive alphabet written by the school’s last teacher, Helen Kerl.
It will all be preserved as workers will remove the newer paint from the wainscoting to reveal the original wood underneath and, since they won’t be able to nail anything into the new plaster wall, they’ll run a photo board around the ceiling line and fill it with images from the school’s past and build glass cabinets to display donated items.
“We’re going to have a lot more exhibits because people are going to want their things here to be on display that were in their other schools,” Colgrove said.
Hanging from the ceiling near the back door and stretching all the way across the room is an enormous curtain. It’s painted with a mountain scene near a lake surrounded by advertisements from businesses in the town from the time it was painted back in 1939.
Centre board member Janey Williams Rudder said that different businesses, like Freel Produce and Feed, Rice’s Red and White Store and Blue Springs State Bank would pay to have the curtains done. Students would use it for programs they’d present to their families, Colgrove said. For being nearly 80 years old, the curtain is still in fair condition and the colors are vibrant.
“We had it up and down and up and down,” Colgrove said. “We had Christmas programs, spring programs, and the piano was always going.”
Colgrove was in the last class at the school, which stopped holding classes in 1960. Her father and her grandfather attended school at Pleasant View, which is what makes the project a personal one for her. She’s written a few grants and they’ve gotten donations from many of the school’s alumni, she said.
They’re hoping to get the interior started this fall, she said, with a goal of having the outside restored in summer of 2019. They’ve got a long way to go, but they’re hoping that getting the restoration done will get them a step closer to getting on the Nebraska Passport program, though that will require more volunteers so the school can stay open longer hours on a more regular schedule.
They’d also like to see more groups of students coming in from surrounding areas. Next week, the fourth graders from Wymore Southern Elementary will be coming in to see what things were like in a one-room school. Rudder will be playing the part of the schoolmarm, teaching lessons and having kids sit in the corner with a dunce cap.
“It’s going to be absolutely beautiful once its done,” Colgrove said. “And it will be something we can pass on to another generation.”
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Information from: Beatrice Sun, http://www.beatricedailysun.com
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