In 2011, the Institute for Small Town Studies relocated to the town of Marenisco (pop. 1051) in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to begin restoration of a 1922 school building in the middle of the Ottawa National Forest. These are a few of the stories uncovered during the restoration process. Check back often for updates..
Welcome to the Roosevelt School
Looking north-east across the tennis court toward the three-story brick Roosevelt School. The red one-room schoolhouse, relocated from the nearby town of Dunham, is still referred to by many as the band house, and you can guess what activity most commonly took place there. The property runs past the school, down the front lawn and includes the stand of pine trees visible along the right side of this photo. All in all, the property comprises between 4 and 5 acres. The town center of Marenisco sits at the bottom of the hill to the right of the pine trees, just outside this photo.
Uncovering the Gymnasium Floor
Okay, I admit, our priorities may be a little askew, but one of the first spaces that needed attention, clearly, was the gymnasium - specifically the gym floor which was covered with a rubberized plastic 'lego-land' safety floor. Underneath this surface we found the original maple hardwood floor. Absolutely gorgeous! A few of the tongue & groove boards have started to cleave, as you can see in the lower right of the free throw lane, most likely from the lack of climate control in the gym since the school closed in 2004, but that shouldn't be too difficult to remedy as the maple boards themselves are still in great shape.
Stocking up for the Winter
One of the great things about living in the middle of a National Forest is the access to plenty of firewood. I'm told we should expect 200 inches of snow this winter, and a wood stove seems a good choice for the one-room school house, moved to Marenisco from its original site down the road in Dunham, Michigan. The building still needs a lot of work inside and out, but getting some heat going now will make it easier to work inside during the long winter. We'll get back to the exterior come spring.
New Street Lights Installed Out Front
I've always liked that line from Garrison Keillor: "In a small town, mowing your lawn is considered urban renewal." One of our first tasks was to clean up the exterior of the buildings and grounds. Its amazing what whacking a few weeds and fixing a few broken windows will do for the overall ambience of what has been a vacant property for the last seven years. Here we can see the new street lamp globes (courtesy of eBay) that would look right at home on a Lionel train set.
Street Lights Wired-Up
I've always been told that I should expect to have to rewire all old light fixtures. These, it turns out, just need new bulbs, a little cleaning, and a few screws tightened where birds had been nesting. Several people in town have already come by to tell me how much they like seeing lights on at the school again. I think Mr. Keillor may be on to something here. And, check out the blue risers on the terrazzo stairs, and the fall-out shelter sign to the right of the front doors.
Found Objects: Things Left Behind When the School Closed
One of the great joys of working on a restoration project is finding the treasure-trove of parts and pieces left behind by previous owners. The furniture and fixtures in the old science room have tremendous potential for re-use. The band uniforms, on the other hand, provide a potent reminder of the activities which once brought this school to life.
Found Art #1: Inside of a Steam Vent
Sometimes the most surprising images are found in the most unexpected places. Here is a photo (upside down) of the inside of a steam vent, the outside of which was repainted at least 10 different times over the years, judging from the 10 different shades of paint that dripped through the vent holes and into the interior of the metal vent.
Found Art #2: Underside of Floor Tiling
The underside of a tile floor, still glued to the bottom of a carpet, both now removed to make way for hardwood maple flooring in the one-room schoolhouse. We're looking at the bottom of a grid of 9 inch tiles, remnants of the glue, two distinctly different trowel patterns from laying the tile, and tar that was laid over the plywood subfloor beneath.
Found Objects: Heywood-Wakefield Classroom Chairs
Found 16 of the larger Heywood-Wakefield wood and metal-frame classroom chairs, and 2 of the smaller version. As with all H-W products, the wood should be Northern Yellow Birch from New Hampshire, shaped and assembled in Massachusetts. Heywood-Wakefield was formed in Massachusetts in 1897 when the Heywood Brothers merged with the Wakefield Company. They still make all their wood furniture in Massachusetts (their upholstered pieces are made in North Carolina). The company was bought in 1922 by the South Beach Furniture Company of Miami Beach, and they really hit their stride in the 30s and 40s with their Art Deco and Mid-Modern classics. Check out their current production lines: Heywood-Wakefield
Found Object: Thonet Bentwood Rocking Chair
The iconic Thonet bentwood rocking chair, designed in Vienna in late 1870s. This version does not have the more common wicker seat and back, but rather sports a soft golden fabric. The chair may have been reupholstered; or it may be a later model. Still need to do some research. Very wobbly, side to side - the joints need work. It will likely need to be completely dismantled and reassembled to become sturdy again.
Southeast Corner Stone
Cornerstones were often laid in the southeast corner of a building to greet the rising sun. They sometimes contained a time capsule of artifacts representing the local community at the time of construction. They can also be helpful in determining when a building was built!
8 Inches of Snow in 4 Hours
The first snow of the winter, with flakes the size of silver dollars.
Already starting to melt the following morning. New exercise regimen: 1/2 hour of shoveling snow every morning.
Marenisco Milltowners - Athletic Championships
These banners hang in the rafters of the Wakefield-Marenisco gymnasium, 14 miles west of Marenisco. The two schools merged in 2004, and the banners were transfered to the new gym. Looking into getting a second set to hang back in their original home.
Gym Floor Update
Speaking of the gym, here's a photo update from our uncovering of the original maple floor.
Re-hanging Doors
Slowly going through the building door-to-door to rehang, reset and recalibrate the doors, door frames, hinges, closers, doorknobs and locksets. Shown here is a 1939 LCN closer, installed to replace one of the building's many missing parts.
Collecting and Cataloging Hardware
As with most any 90 year-old building of this size, many different makes and models of the hardware were put into service over the years. Conditions vary, but much of the durable metal hardware should clean-up quite nicely and head right back into use. The exterior doors on the south of the building (one of which is shown above right) sport brass Von Duprin locks, latches, crash bars and handles from Indianapolis. What looks like a wood door is actually a 1/8 inch steel surface formed around a solid core wood door. It weighs heavy on its hinges, but survived 80-plus years of school wear and tear. The door's window is 1/4 inch tempered glass.
Inspecting the Roof
The Roosevelt School is topped with a Dura-Last roof, a PVC membrane installed almost 20 years ago by Nasi Roofing in Minocqua, Wisconsin. Nasi still has the records of the original installation, and they came out to inspect the entire surface and all its welds, looking for cracks, holes, or any other anomalies. The good news: nobody has been on the roof for years so there's little damage to the surface. The bad news: nobody's been on the roof for years to conduct routine inspections and maintenance.
Behind the roofers you can see the roof above the auditorium sloping toward the photographer. The entire roof drains through two holes, into nine inch cast iron drainpipes which travel through the center of the building and empty out into the landscape to the east and south of the school. One of those drains can been seen here, the small black hole in the foreground.
Patching the Fabric Roof
Here a small hole, about the size of a dime, is being repaired. The membrane has been cut out around the tear, about 4-5 inches in diameter, and replaced with a new piece of PVC fabric, which will then be welded into place.
View to the South
As long as we're up on the roof, here's a view looking out over town toward the south.
One-Room Schoolhouse Floor
The one-room schoolhouse actually has four rooms: one large classroom (19 feet wide by 29 feet long by 12 feet high), an entry vestibule, and two small corner rooms - perfect for storage, a small office, or a bathroom. We were hoping to find hardwood floors underneath the carpet, but only found floor tile and plywood sub-flooring. Cleaning and prepping the floor for a new hardwood surface. The walls are plaster and lath throughout the interior of the building. The piano's a Bush and Lane upright grand, built in Chicago between 1917 and 1918.
Weather Report
The weather reports keep suggesting 1 to 3 inches of snow, but in the morning it tends to look more like 8 to 12. The former Chicago North Western railroad line through Marenisco is now a snowmobile trail, part of a network of trails reconnecting towns that used to be served by the railroads. A good map of the local trails through Michigan's Upper Peninsula can be found at the Michigan DNR website. On this map Marenisco sits at the intersection of trails 1 and 2.
Keeping an Eye on the Sky
One of the first things you will notice when you visit this area is that the Ottawa National Forest is blessed with beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Restoration work progresses largely during daylight hours, so the sunrise and sunset serve as colorful bookends to the workday. Everyone should have a job that starts and stops like this.
Theodore Roosevelt
Built in 1922, the Marenisco School was named after Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, as the large bas-relief above the school's front doors indicates. In 1908, nearing the end of his second term in office, Roosevelt appointed a Presidential Commission on Country Life to gather information about, and propose ways to alleviate, rural distress. Comprised of farmers, educators, conservationists and urban progressives, the commission found that, "everywhere there is a demand that education have relation to living, that the school should express the daily life, and that in rural districts they should educate by means of agriculture and country life subjects." Teaching, they said, should be "visual, direct, and applicable," related always to the immediate needs of farm, home, and community.
Details, Details, Details
A few views of the terrazzo floors in the school's main entry, grand stairway and hallways. Terrazzo has been used as a building material for thousands of years, mixing small chips of marble, quartz or granite into a cement paste which when hardened can be smoothed, shaped and polished, More affordable than marble, with more decorative potential than plain concrete, terrazzo was a common floor material for the public spaces in the school buildings in this area.
The View from Stubbings Street
A foggy day in the forest. It's the middle of December and it's 40F degrees outside. Snow's melting quickly. Great for working outdoors (and for verifying that the roof no longer leaks!) but not so great for local skiing, snowmobiling or ice fishing.
Rethinking the Bathrooms
Two new bathrooms - one boys, one girls - were installed on the ground floor in 2003, less than a year before the school closed. Each room contains two showers, two sinks and three toilets. On one hand, the bathrooms have hardly been used and the fixtures are in pristine condition. On the other hand, the newer materials in these rooms don't really fit with the historic character of the rest of the building. In addition, the heating system needs to be updated, and some of the electrical wiring needs to be re-configured. The lights, heaters and exhaust fans were set up to turn on and off automatically via a motion sensor in the ceiling (which no longer works), so there are no light switches or on-off controls for the fans. More personal control of the rooms' systems would be nice. The plumbing also needs to be inspected for leaks. Fortunately most of the pipes were hidden above a drop ceiling, and not in between the walls. New stalls and ceiling treatments should go a long way toward realigning the aesthetic character of these rooms with the rest of the building.
Deer on the Tennis Court
Whitetail deer tracks criss-cross the tennis court in the fresh snow. Several other animal tracks are yet to be identified. Most days bald eagles can be seen just over the left field fence of the baseball diamond across the street. School records in Wakefield confirm the red building was moved to this site from the town of Dunham in 1937 - for a price of $350.
Another Dunham Structure
The homestead just to the south of the Roosevelt School under fresh snow. The main house on this property was also moved to Marenisco from Dunham. It has been added to since.
Sister Schools
Driving around the county, several school buildings can be found which closely resemble the Roosevelt School in architectural design and construction. Above, the Washington School, built in 1919, still serves as an elementary school in Bessemer. The Washington School is quite a bit larger than the Roosevelt School, but the two share many of the same masonry details.
The Central School, built in 1902, served as Wakefield's elementary school until 2000, when its operations merged with the Wakefield High School down the street. Central School had two front entries and an extra classroom bay in the center of each floor, but otherwise the two buildings share a similar floor plan. The window arrangement is slightly different on the ground floor, and there is a bit more detail around the entry towers. Also, the Central School does not have a gymnasium-auditorium wing in the back like the Roosevelt School. This building was recently converted to apartments.
The McKinley School in Ironwood is the smallest of the elementary schools we've found so far. The building is currently vacant, its windows and doors boarded up, but the brickwork and detailing are unmistakably similar - a clear family resemblance to the Roosevelt School.
Today's Conundrum
Uncovering the original gym floor revealed five places where the maple hardwood floor has expanded and begun to cleave. Lack of climate control in the gym for the past seven years has led to this unfortunate condition, but seeing as the boards themselves are still solid, a suitable repair should be manageable.
The first step is to gently (as possible) remove the offending tongue and groove boards. The first Sawzall cut is the most unnerving - trying to remember something about breaking eggs and making omelets.
The uprooted boards are laid out next to the opening, ready to be cleaned up and prepped for reinsertion into the gym floor. Fortunately, the subfloor underneath the maple is in great shape and does not appear to be responsible for the uneven floor above it. The rise of the expanded boards is complicated by long nails which have come up out of the subfloor.
"Mellen 54" is stamped on the underside of each board. The town of Mellen, Wisconsin, home to several lumber companies, is located about an hour due west of Marenisco. 54 should refer to the date the boards were milled, but the Mellen Lumber Company moved from Mellen to Ontonagon in 1928. Need to do a little more investigating: was the original gym floor replaced in 1954? or does 54 refer to something else? and does Mellen refer to the town or the mill?
Update: Folks in town familiar with the lumber mills and their operations suggest that 54 refers not to the date the wood was milled, but rather to a lot number. Lot numbers help customers who order a selection of wood and later run out, by allowing them to order additional product which matches the wood from the original lot number.
More Heywood-Wakefield
This little table sat in the teachers' lounge. Another Heywood-Wakefield product, as evidenced by the brand stamp burnt into the underside of the tabletop.
Winter Solstice
The sun rises directly over town on the shortest day of the year, lighting the terraced lawn in front of the school.
Later that day, the sun sets over the tennis court and south of the big hill west of town - home to radio towers, a cell phone tower, and the town water tower. The USGS map still hanging on the wall in the principal's office marks the hill's elevation at 1720 feet, the school at 1550, and the bridge over the Presque Isle River downtown at 1499.
Speaking of elevations, this US Coast & Geodetic Survey Benchmark is located on the south face of the school, just west of the south entrance, about a foot off the ground. Note that the elevation is not marked on the disk proper. The National Geodetic Survey data sheet, however, lists the elevation of the disk at 1541.56 feet. Geeky, I know, but kind of fun nonetheless. The NGS confirms the disk was 'monumented' (secured in place) in 1948 - "set in a massive structure... [which will] probably hold its position/elevation well." It also records the benchmark's location as 'recovered' (verified still in place) in 1987 and 2004 by the US Power Squadron and in 1997 by the Michigan Department of Transportation. In August 2004, "the site was reported as suitable for satellite observations."
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