FAMILY HOPES TO SAVE LIBERTY SCHOOLHOUSE

David Brown, left, and his wife, Jodie, stood with her parents, Karen and Med Baker at the historical marker outside of the old Liberty Schoolhouse.

A piece of history sits deteriorating in a pasture off County Road 231 three miles south of Gordonville and might eventually be gone altogether if no effort is made to save it.

This historic structure is the Liberty School building, built in 1890 and used through 1945. The hole in its roof, the plank siding missing from it walls, the rotting boards of its floor attest to years of neglect since the school closed.

The family that owns the property where the school sits is looking for help to save the building.

"A lot of people went to school there, and it holds sentimental value for them," said Jodie Brown of Jackson. She and her husband, David, are buying part of the farm on which the old school sits from her mother, Karen Baker, and her husband, Med.

The family hopes people will pitch in to donate labor, materials or money to repair the school.

"We can't afford to do it ourselves," Brown said. Neither do they have the time. Both Brown and her husband work full time.

Plus, she says, "we've got seven horses, seven cats, three dogs and three kids, so we don't have a lot of extra time."

Brown's children are the main factor in their move to do something with the building now.

The Browns are preparing to move to the land, which has only been used by the Bakers as a weekend retreat. The Browns are afraid one of their three children, the youngest a 7-year-old, might get hurt if the building continues to deteriorate.

Brown said if no one steps forward to repair the building, her family might tear it down for safety reasons.

"It is fixable, though I don't know how refined it would be," said Karen Baker.

A tree has damaged the front part of the tin roof, and the floor beneath has suffered weather damage. One area of the floorboards has rotted away, exposing the ground underneath. The windows are gone, and the door is missing, although it does have boards over it.

Some of the boards of the plank siding are missing from the exterior of the building, and the wooden foundation needs shoring up.

Immediate needs to keep the school from deteriorating further, Baker said, include old roof tin, two-by-fours for the siding and railroad ties for the foundation.

Someone was once interested enough in the building to put a marker in front of it. Dated 1976, several years before the Bakers bought the property, the marker reads:

"Site of Liberty School, District No. 60, 1890-1945, First Liberty, 1846-1890, was one mile north."

Information on Liberty School gleaned from past newspaper reports show the frame structure was built in 1890 for a cost of $600. It was built to replace the original Liberty School building, a log structure. The earliest classes had children ranging in ages from 7 to possibly 25.

One-room schools played an important role in the development of our society, serving as the main source of early education for a large percentage of the older adults of the United States, according to information from the Center for Regional History and Culture at Southeast Missouri State University.

However, there are few efforts to save such schools, according to the center.

There are some success stories of schools being saved.

Elroy Kinder, who coincidentally attended Liberty School in kindergarten in 1939, is on a committee that helped preserve the Hanover School next to Hanover Lutheran Church on Perryville Road.

When the church opened an education wing in 1991, the old school built in 1924 was no longer needed, Kinder said. Rather than let the building waste away as has happened at some old schools, church members have worked to preserve it as a historic building.

The church's Lutheran Heritage Committee, of which Kinder is a member, gained a historic designation for the building and have preserved part of it as a one-room school museum. It is stocked with teacher and student desks with ink wells, a slate chalkboard, piano, picture of George Washington on the wall, flag and maps that were used in the old school.

Money from tours, grants and contributions fund the upkeep of the school, Kinder said.

"One thing needed to preserve an old building is to find a use for it," Kinder said. That's why he thinks the Hanover School building was saved. It serves as a museum for those who want to see what education was like in the time of one-room schools and is used as a meeting place.

A museum also was made of the Higgerson School in downtown New Madrid, but it took lots of money, labor and persistence to get it there, said Riley Bock, prosecuting attorney for New Madrid County, who helped lead the restoration effort.

The Higgerson School was in terrible shape when work began several years ago, Bock said. The school, built in 1940, had sat empty since it closed in 1967 after the Higgerson community dissolved because of flooding from the Mississippi River. The roof had caved in, one wall had collapsed.

Through a community effort, the building was shored up, moved 11 miles and restored to serve as a museum that opened last year.

"There were a lot of people living who went to the school, many of the teachers who taught there were still alive, and a lot of people from the community were interested in the school," Bock said. "This gave us a good base of support."

Bock said, "We were able to raise quite a bit of money and get a lot of labor donated to fix up, move and restore the school." To date more than $50,000 has been donated, and the dollar value for donated labor equals at least that amount.

"It has been quite an undertaking," Bock said.

Now the goal is to make visitors aware of the museum and the tours that are offered for $2 for adults and $1 for children. The goal, Bock said, is for the school to eventually pay for itself.

During tours, docents explain the history of the one-room school system in general and the Higgerson School in particular.

"We want to educate people about an educational system that doesn't exist anymore," said Bock, noting that at the turn of the century, there were 100,000 small, community schools.

Like most one-room schools, the Higgerson School was more than a place of learning, said Bock, who just retired as president of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

"Such schools were often the only public building in the community, so they served as the community building, polling place, church, even funerals were held there," Bock said. "These schools represent more than a school building. They represent what used to exist in these small communities."

Kinder can't remember much about his own school experiences at Liberty because it was so long ago and he was so young, but he does remember hearing family members talk about it. Kinder's family homesteaded in the Gordonville area in the 1840s and many of his forbearers attended the school.

"My ancestors spoke fondly of the school," Kinder said. "They had good memories of attending the one-room school and the relationships established in that intimate atmosphere."

Kinder said there are some one-room school buildings still around, though many of them are being used for other purposes. Some have been turned into houses, some are storage areas, some are make-shift barns.

"I've seen a couple you couldn't even tell were a school," Kinder said. Many others are gone, either torn down by landowners or destroyed by the elements.

Baker hopes to interest enough people that the same fate doesn't befall the Liberty School on her property.

The building is on the front edge of the Bakers' property, close to the gravel county road, so it would be easy to fence off the school, said Brown, Baker's daughter. The family would be willing to lease the land the building sits on for a nominal fee if a person or organization is interested in repairing and maintaining the building.

"We'd be willing to work with someone," said Brown, who is even considering holding fund raisers for the school if she sees interest from others in the community.

"I just hate to see that building destroyed," she said.

Those who would like to donate materials, labor or money to the efforts to renovate Liberty School, can contact Karen Baker, 243-1177.