William Summers deeded the land for Monroe Township’s original District 10 schoolhouse, a log cabin, in 18571. A year later, the building was displaced by a frame structure. The second school was moved across the road to become a church in 1889, when a brick schoolhouse was built on its original site2.
The District 10 schoolhouse originally was known by the name of its landowner, but locals wound up calling it Fairview. The building closed in 1923 after a consolidated school at Orestes was built to absorb the remaining one-room schoolhouses of western Monroe Township3.
Fairview’s former students held their first reunion that year. 1927 brought a joint reunion between the Fairview, Olive Branch, and King’s schoolhouses at Gooding Grove, a mile west of the building4. At the time, residents of the area planned to purchase Fairview from the township in order to use the abandoned schoolhouse as a community center5.
Unfortunately, the history of the schoolhouse dries up from there. Today, it appears to sit abandoned.
Sources Cited
1 Fairview School Home-Coming All Day Sunday (1925, May 26). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 1
2 Fairview School to Hold Reunion Sunday, May 24 (1925, May 22). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 1.3 3 Orestes Elementary School faces, history, and memories (2003, June 18). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 8.
4 Reunion Sunday Will Attract Large Crowd (1927, June 11). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 1.
5 (See footnote 4).
