A one-room schoolhouse was relocated from a property north of Merna in Custer County to its new home east of Broken Bow on Tuesday.It's becoming part of a historic exhibit at the Sandhills Journey National Scenic Byway Visitors Center that includes a barn, a windmill and a sod house, similar to those built by homesteaders in the Great Plains.
Dozens gathered at the new site to watch Star House Moving personnel carefully position the century-old structure onto a foundation that was poured over the summer, according to Sandhills Express.
Howard Gaffney of Anselmo attended the school from Kindergarten to second grade in the early 1950s and was instrumental in its relocation.
“My hope and dreams of course is to get it refurbed enough that we can use it as a place where teachers from wherever, in this county especially, would come and spend a day on a trip with kids and give them some experience on what our ancestors all went through,” Gaffney said on the chilly, overcast November morning.
Before it can be used to once again educate children, the schoolhouse needs some work and decoration. Patty Spanel Winchester taught at the school from 1957 to 1959. She kept some of the books she used to teach her students, which she plans to place in the building as part of the permanent exhibit, along with some class photos from her time there.
“It brings back a lot of memories, but back then it was a big building,” Spanel Winchester said. “Today it’s a little one. The entry way there just seems so small.”
Gaffney laughed and agreed. He closely followed the history of the schoolhouse, which had been moved once before from its original location to a property owned, eventually, by former Nebraska State Senator Howard Lamb.
Gaffney said he visited Lamb several times before the former senator’s death in 2015 to inquire about moving the building for educational purposes. He continued the effort with Lamb’s son, Dave Lamb, who agreed when the space at the Byway Visitors Center – also known as The Red Barn – was made available.
“A lot of us are taking pride in this particular area right here,” Gaffney said of the 14-acre space that, he said, was designated “to develop and preserve the history of this county, let alone this part of the state of Nebraska.”
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METHODOLOGY
Nick Loomis came across the relocation-in-progress of the one-room schoolhouse in the course of traveling through Nebraska for reporting on another story. He stopped to interview onlookers and take photographs.
TYPE OF STORY
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