SCHOOL DAYS: OLD COUNTY SCHOOLS LEAVE A PLEASANT MEMORY

CAPE GIRARDEAU - The daily newspapers continue to blast the public with the need to increase the educational budget and upgrade the educational system of Missouri's schools. The goal is to continue improving education for the next five years to prepare students for the SPACE AGE.

While legislators and instructors seem dissatisfied, students continue to enjoy their school years as they have done for centuries, remembering events, teachers and buildings where they learned reading, writing, arithmetic and all the other subjects in the curriculum.

Some of the old schools remain in Cape Girardeau, but some of the very old buildings have been demolished. Two of these that no longer stand, and were landmarks, were on Spanish Street St. Vincent's Parochial School, originally for boys, and St. Vincent's Young Ladies Academy.

The boys school was on the south side of St. Vincent's Church on the site where Commandant Lorimier's Red House was built. The girls academy was a short distance south on the northeast corner of Spanish and Good Hope. This is a short history of the two old schools.

The priests from the Congregation of the Missions (CMs), who lived and instructed at St. Vincent's Seminary, were the instructors at the boys school. The Sisters of Loretta from Nerinx, near Louisville, Ky. who organized in 1836, opened the girls school in 1838. It continued to operate during the Civil War.

For years, hundreds of girls from the mid-south were students, but gradually the attendance fell, settling at an enrollment level of around 65.

When public school education in Cape Girardeau improved and was more accessible, the convent enrollment decreased again and the school closed. The sisters remained for several years, and five of them became instructors at the parochial school.

The school building was a two-story, dark red brick structure with 12-foot ceilings and arched windows on all sides of the building.

There were five windows and a door facing Spanish Street, four windows on the north and south side of the school on each floor and six facing the river. The school was well constructed, and the windows were covered with arched shutters. There were three rooms downstairs and four upstairs.

The brick work was designed in arched columns and around the cap of the building the brick work was laid in a Roman border design. Huge chimneys two on the north and two on the south side of the roof served the wood stoves that heated the school.

The entrance door faced Spanish Street and was protected by a vestibule with double doors. The arch over the door was left uncovered so the downstairs hallway and long flight of stairs would receive light. The long flight of stairs to the second floor was tempting for children, who wanted to slide down the banister.

Representatives from the Preservation of Landmarks of the National Trust toured Cape Girardeau in 1971 and one of the structures most impressive and picturesque, in their judgment, was this school building. Originally there was a low stone wall on which an iron fence was fastened that encircled and protected the school grounds.

After the school closed, the building began to need extensive repairs and money was lacking for that purpose. For a while the building was used for a parish hall and two of the downstairs rooms were used by the Cancer Society as the "Cancer Cabinet" where bandages were dispensed each week to cancer patients and staffed by volunteers from Beta Sigma Phi.

When St. Vincent's Church was painted white, the school building also was painted white. Later it was stuccoed and repainted white, but looked rather gray. Eventually the wood shutters were removed. When a furnace was installed, the double wooden doors were removed. The stone wall and the iron fence were removed when the street was paved and a sidewalk laid. But attempts to modernize the 19th century building were a mistake.

When the church board decided it could no longer afford to keep the building and repair it, the board decided to have it demolished. Sentimental city residents bemoaned the decision but nothing could stop the destruction or save the school.

Today both schools are only a memory to older residents of Cape Girardeau landmarks of another era.