A historic one-room schoolhouse in Patton Township is newly restored after a project to ensure it will remain an experiential educational resource well into the future.
The Centre County Historical Society recently finished a nine-month restoration project for the Boogersburg School, the last surviving of the 180 one-room schoolhouses that once populated the county. The $200,000 project was financed by a fundraising campaign completed last summer.
A public open house will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday at the 148-year-old schoolhouse, 1021 Fox Hill Road. A brief welcome and recognition of those who contributed to the restoration, including lead gift benefactor the Hamer Foundation, will take place at 1:30 p.m.
“We are honored to showcase this unique piece of Centre County history to our members, donors, friends, and the community,” CCHS Executive Director Mary Sorensen said in a news release. “The building and grounds are in great shape to accommodate our mission of education and outreach for the next generation.”
CCHS has preserved and operated the Boogersburg School since 2004 when it was gifted to the organization by Robert Struble and Susan Crary, who had purchased it in 20021 and restored and furnished it to interpret school life in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Over the past 20 years, thousands of local elementary students have visited the school to experience history by reliving a late-19th century school day, with volunteer docents acting as schoolmarms.
For the recent renovation project, the building was restored inside and out, and landscaping has been updated to be more accessible, educational and environmentally friendly while respecting the historical aspects of the grounds.
Work started with the strategic removal of dead, diseased and invasive trees, and native plantings reflective of the how the grounds would have been landscaped in the late 19th and early 20th century were added.
The exterior of the whitewashed, board-and-batten has been painted, the foundation repaired and a wood shed replaced with a larger structure that maintains historic aesthetics.
Inside the electric service has been upgraded, along with painting, plaster work and other retouches.
Architect Alan Popovich, Veronesi Building & Remodeling, Inc., Alex’s ProScape, Cutting Edge Tree Professionals, House Wire Electric and Homewrights Construction worked on the project.
Moses Thompson, the former Centre Furnace ironmaster and largest landowner in the county at the time, deeded the land for the school in the area then known as Pleasant Hill in 1877 and the schoolhouse was built the same year. It was one of several schools built at Thompson’s direction to ensure an education for the children of tenant farmers who lived more than miles from the Centre Furnace Village, which had its own school.
The Boogersburg School operated for 75 years, serving children from first through eighth grade until 1952.
“One-room schoolhouses were the physical expression of the ‘common school’ movement, which began in the 1830s and lasted up to the 1950s,” CCHS President Roger Williams said. “Guided by the belief that the American democratic experiment needed a literate, educated populace to function properly, the common school movement provided America’s youth with free elementary education in grades one through eight. Pennsylvania’s Common School Law of 1834 left it up to local township school boards to accept the free schools and collect the taxes to finance their operation.”
After the school closed, Joseph and Sibyl Barsky Grucci purchased the property at auction in 1953. Sibyl Barsky Grucci, a nationally known sculptor and artist whose bust of Fred Louis Pattee is on display in Penn State’s Pattee Library, used the schoolhouse as a studio until 2001.
The building was left well intact for the Strubles, who purchased it that year and restored it with the help of a former Boogersburg teacher and former students before donating it in 2004 to CCHS, which has preserved it as a living history museum.
“The Centre County Historical Society is deeply committed to its preservation—not just as a historic site, but a living history museum where visitors of all ages can connect with the past in a meaningful way,” Sorensen said. “It recreates the educational experience of American schoolchildren over a century of our nation’s history.”
For those attending the open house, parking is available on the adjacent lawn near the school and along Pleasant Hill Road.
Visit centrehistory.org/visit-us/boogersburg/ for more information about the Boogersburg School.
