1-room schoolhouse reopened by EWU

Blue skies, sunshine and “old-timey” fiddle music set the mood Friday afternoon at a one-room school house tucked between expansive brick buildings and auditoriums at Eastern Washington University. There, a slice of teaching’s history was opened to the public.

After four years of work, EWU held a grand opening of the Cheney Normal School Heritage Center in the one-room schoolhouse. It was brought onto campus and refurbished to look as it did when built in 1905, at its original wooded location outside Newport.

Professors and students, some with complimentary pieces of horehound candy, walked past the desks, slates and old photos on display. A leather book strap bundled two McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Books on an antique student desk. Judy Rogers, an employee of EWU’s foundation, was dressed in a schoolmarm’s outfit as she talked about the school to visitors.

The school’s metal roof kept out much of the damaging moisture over the years, she told two EWU students who wandered in. The pine wainscoting was replicated, but the wood floor is original. The bell tower was rebuilt and the front of the schoolhouse’s exterior kept its original shingles, which were so paint-thirsty that workers put on about five coats, Rogers said.

The project cost around $200,000 in private donations, Rogers said.

Students Lew Spelgatti and Cassie Driggs finished a psychology test early and decided to check out the structure.

“I like old stuff, like frontier,” Driggs said. “I always wanted to go in.”

She passed on the old-fashioned black hunks of horehound candy, which were a trademark of the school’s founding mother, Betsie Jore. She had 14 children and was famous for always having that candy in her pockets.

“It looked like coal,” Driggs said.

“It’s kind of like going to a museum,” Spelgatti said.

The Cheney Normal School Heritage Center is to be a venue for seminars and presentations related to the history and development of education in the region. It’s also a place to display schoolhouse artifacts. Many of the items were donated from personal collections.

Driggs thought there should have been a dunce cap, maybe in the corner somewhere, for the class cutup.

Professor Armin Arndt, 63, who’s been teaching at Eastern since 1972, had been looking forward to seeing the finished school house. He’d walked through the framed structure a half-dozen times as crews kept making improvements. He passed up the morning events due to the large crowds who came to hear the speakers like Don Johnson, who presented a photograph of his then-19-year-old mother who taught at the school.

“My parents went to school in places like this,” Arndt said. “This feels right. This is how education was.”

For EWU, the schoolhouse is a nod to its long history of preparing teachers. In 1890, the Cheney State Normal School became Washington’s first institution to train teachers. That school evolved into EWU, where more than 20 percent of this year’s students are pursuing careers in education.

In two weeks, the community will be able to arrange for private tours by calling 359-2232.