photo by Laura Sitzman Huizinga
Alden Town Park
The 1866 map of Alden shows 15 school districts. Some of those fifteen were shared districts with surrounding towns Lancaster, Marilla, Newstead, Darien, and Bennington. Each district had its own one-room or two-room school and its own board of trustees. After centralization of the district in the early 1950s, most of the schoolhouses were either remodeled into homes or torn down.
The Henskee Road School, District #11, built in the 1850s, stood on a small knoll on the south side of Henskee Road on land donated by Samuel and Adeline St. John, just east of the border of the Buffalo Creek Reservation. When Casper Henskee purchased the property in 1883, it was with the agreement that it remain school district property. Children from families living on Sullivan Road, Dersam Road, Henskee Road and the Cowlesville Road (Exchange Street) attended this school until 1929. It continued as a district meeting place until 1949.
In the 1950s the small schoolhouse was moved across the road into the Henskee farmyard and used as a storage shed. Henrietta Henskee donated the schoolhouse to the Town of Alden in 1976 as part of the nation’s Bicentennial Celebration and the building was picked up, loaded on a trailer and moved to the Alden Town Park.
Time passed and the little building was neglected until a restoration group was formed in 2002. This group obtained grant money to move the schoolhouse to a new block foundation, re-roof with cedar shingles, and repair the siding and windows. The inside was painted and more desks were found. A walkway was built and the Alden Garden Club began plantings.
The schoolhouse is now open during Alden celebrations and for tours by schoolchildren. During the school tours each child takes on the name and age of a student who once attended the school and then “studies” lessons in arithmetic, reading and spelling for that age group.
The worn wooden floor, the coal burning stove in the middle of the room, and the desks attached to the floor all speak of a simpler time when students from first grade to eighth grade all studied and learned in one room.
When asked about the bar over the doorway to the storage room, the late Norma Sweet, a former pupil in the school, answered that the bar was their gymnasium. They did chin-ups on it.
Credit to Karen Muchow, Alden Town & Village Historian.