801 Grant Ave History from Louisville Historian

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Issue #87 The Louisville Historian A Publication of the Louisville Wistorical Commission and Society Summer 2010 The Story of the Little Brick School House By Bridget Bacon, Museum Coordinator Louisville's "little brick school house," as it used to be called, has served our community in many ways for over 115 years. Today, the building is the Louisville Center for the Arts at 801 Grant and it continues to be at the center of cultural and recreational activity. The story starts when the building was constructed with two rooms to be a school for first and second graders. School Board Records Show When Building Was Constructed The year of construction of a historic building can be difficult to ascertain, but important to know. County records of these dates are often inaccurate and should not be relied upon without examining all of the available evidence. Boulder County gives the year of construction of the Center for the Arts building as 1980, which clearly is not correct. For decades, the year 1903 was repeated as the year in which the school house was constructed. This erroneous information may have originated with a 1933 newspaper article about Louisville schools. In fact, there was a school bond issue in 1903, and that may have led to the confusion. However, a review of the original school board minutes for Louisville School District #29 shows that the building was actually constructed nine years earlier, in 1894. Moreover, a written notation by Nelle Wolfer Willis, who was born in 1890, helped point away from the date of 1903. She wrote that she began attending first grade in the brick school starting in 1896. Transition from a School to Other Uses Louisville was a growing town that valued education, so it wanted and made sure that it got a real high school. A high school building was constructed and opened in 1920 at the southeast corner of Garfield and Walnut. This development is said to have freed up space in the grade school for the first and second graders and led to a new period of usage for the "little brick school house." It would continue to be owned by the Louisville School District for another forty years, but appears not to have been used for day -long school classes ever again. Brick school house, early 1900s. (90-25-13) For over 25 years, the children of Louisville's coal miners came to school here. These were hard times. During this period, Louisville went through the growing pains of becoming a real town, suffered economically through the 1910-14 coal mining strike, experienced the closure of the Louisville Bank and saw its town marshal killed in 1915, experienced epidemics such as the influenza epidemic of 1918, and saw the tragic deaths of six Louisville residents (with injuries to many other residents) in a 1920 Interurban train accident. It is hoped that young first and second graders were somewhat insulated from these hardships as they attended school in the brick school house. Close up of a girl from a photo of her class taken by the brick school house. Circa 1900.