Going 'old school'
BRADY TWP — A apparition appears every winter at the Jennings Environmental Educational Center, 2951 Prospect Road.
Park visitors may see a ghostly structure by looking through the trees toward Route 528. It's a small white building with a bell tower. It's an old one-room schoolhouse, nestled near the Brydon Mine and the park's passive natural filtration system that combats acid mine drainage.
The Moraine McConnells Mill Jennings Commission, a nonprofit organization that assists local nature parks, has renewed plans to bring the Foltz Schoolhouse back to life, according to Debbie Sale, the commission's secretary and a Jennings volunteer.
Sale said the effort needs recruits and donations, and the commission plans to kick off its campaign March 21 by showcasing the building's potential through a presentation including early-period photographs of the school and videos of people relaying their memories of their own school days there.
“The schoolhouse is well known,” Sale said. “A lot of people want to see this history kept, and we want to see it used.”
The schoolhouse was completed in October 1888 and remained in use until 1963, according to Dave Johnson, a retired park manager for Jennings.
“It was one of the last ones in use,” Johnson said. “It fell into pretty bad condition in the late 1960s.”
Made almost entirely of wood, the frame, roof and floor succumbed to rot. In 2006, Johnson opened the door to new possibilities.
Johnson and a team of volunteers worked on the school in their free time. The workers replaced all the rotten structural pieces. Then, they fabricated a replica bell tower made to resemble the building's 1920s appearance and replaced the broken windows with imitations made of wood, not glass.
After Johnson's retirement, the building was no longer an active project, until the committee got involved..
“We have had some groups before, but we've never had a group like the 3MJC (the committee),” Johnson said.
The building has new bones, but the guts still missing; no desks, no windows, no chalkboard. Visitors would see only an empty room. There's even still scorch marks from the fire that destroyed the original bell tower.
Sale said the project could be lengthy, especially because the committee will most likely have to work on it in spurts.
“We have tons of work inside and some work to be done outside as well,” Sale said.
Inside, Sale said the committee wants to replace the floor and ceiling boards, plaster the walls and add some minor electrical and heating elements without greatly compromising the historical accuracy. She said the outside needs some fresh paint and new functional windows.
Nancy Nalepa, a volunteer for the committee and Jennings, said she and Sale have been visiting other schoolhouses like the Foltz one, so they can also think about what type of artifacts to display. One thing she noticed was that the desks weren't arranged always in rows like they are today.
“Some of the schools had desks (in the middle) and benches along the wall,' she said.
Nalepa said she would also like to do further research and listen to more stories from those who actually attended the Foltz School to pinpoint what the room might have actually contained during the 1920s. She said if anyone would like to donate artifacts, photographs or even their memories of the school to contact the committee through its website.
Nalepa said she suspects there's more information lingering in the community than people might realize and hopes people come forward to donate their time to the project.
Having received good responses from those who attended the school, Sale said she is confident the schoolhouse can play an important role in further educating the park's visitors and teaching future generations.
She said it will also allow some to remember an important piece of their own history and what made the school special to them.
“They feel like it was a community, like it was a family,” Sale said.
For more information on the Moraine McConnells Mill Jennings Commission, visit its website at www.3mjc.org.
