For 168 years, a schoolhouse stood watch over the northwest corner of County Road 900 North and Florida Road in Madison County’s Monroe Township. Unfortunately, the old building -known to some as Summers and to others as Fairview- is gone. Another piece of local history was quietly erased last week.
William Summers deeded a patch of land for the original District 10 schoolhouse, a humble log cabin, in 18571. Just a year later, that first building gave way to a sturdier frame structure. When a brick schoolhouse was built on the site in 1889, the second school wasn’t torn down. Instead, it was carefully moved across the road and repurposed as a church2.
Although it was first known by the name of its original landowner, the District 10 school soon picked up a more familiar name among locals: Fairview. The little brick school served the community for decades before closing its doors in 1923 after a new consolidated school opened in Orestes3. Fairview’s former students wasted no time keeping their memories alive, though; they held their first reunion the same year the school closed.
By 1927, the gathering had grown into a joint reunion with alumni from Olive Branch and King’s schoolhouses hosted at Gooding Grove just a mile west of Fairview4. Around that time, neighbors began making plans to buy the old building from the township in hopes of giving it new life as a community center. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that ever happened. Now the schoolhouse is gone- demolished, cleared away, and erased from the landscape it anchored for more than a century.
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.
3 Reunion Sunday Will Attract Large Crowd (1927, June 11). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 1.
4 (See footnote 2).
