This School in northern MI was abandoned in 1980
Central School, Iron River Michigan
Central School was Iron River's largest public school building, from its initial construction in 1904-05 until a new high school was completed in 1928. The school initially served as the high school for the entire school district, which served all of Iron River Township, including the village, and also as the primary school, grades K through 8, for two of the district's four subdistricts within the village. Following the completion of the high school, the building served grades K through 8 and then later as a middle school until its closing at the end of the 1979-80 school year. The school building, enlarged in 1910-11 to its present size and form, is an architecturally distinguished example of early twentieth-century public school architecture planned by two prominent Midwest school architecture specialists, Van Ryn & DeGelleke of Milwaukee (1904-05 work) and John D. Chubb of Chicago (1910-11 additions).
Iron River's settlement began with explorations of the area for iron ore deposits by Donald C. and Alexander MacKinnon and Richard L. and William H. Selden. The Iron River Mine (later known as the Stambaugh and then the Riverton Mine), the town's first iron mine, was established in 1881, and in that same year the MacKinnons platted the first part of Iron River on their lands. With the opening in 1882 of a railroad line east to Crystal Falls, connecting with the Menominee Branch of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, mining activity began a rapid expansion and miners, loggers, and people seeking land for farms began arriving. Iron River was incorporated as a village in 1885.
Iron River's first school classes were held in the winter of 1883-84 in a log building located at the southwest corner of Genesee and 4th streets, one block southwest of the Central School building. In 1884 Iron River Township School District No. 1 bought a site at the northeast corner of Cayuga and North 3rd that includes part of the present site and built there the first Central School, a two-story gable-roof frame building. Growth of the population necessitated a two-story addition to the east side by 1889, purchase of additional property to the east, extending over to North 2nd, in 1893, and construction of an identical wing on the west side by 1898. By 1902 a separate wooden kindergarten building also stood at the northwest corner of Cayuga and North 2nd.
The early twentieth-century history of the Iron River school district was one of constant struggles to keep up with a rapidly rising population resulting from the mining boom. The original Central School initially housed the community's entire public school system, but additional buildings soon became necessary. The new school that was proposed for the site was to serve as a high school and junior high.
The September 1902 Sanborn fire insurance map shows the footprint of the original part of the present building, labeled "from plans," but the building was not actually constructed until 1904-05. The site was located just to the northeast of the wooden Central School. Milwaukee architects Van Ryn & De Gelleke, specialists in school building design, designed the building. Henry J. Van Ryn (born 1864) and Gerrit J. DeGelleke (born 1872) both grew up in Milwaukee. Van Ryn first worked for Milwaukee architects Charles A. Gombert, James Douglas, and Edward Townsend Mix before establishing his own firm in 1888. DeGelleke served as a draftsman in Van Ryn's office in the early 1890s and, following architectural course work at the University of Pennsylvania in 1895-97, went into partnership with Van Ryn in 1897. The firm had a wide-ranging practice, but specialized in schools and hospitals. They designed all the Milwaukee public schools built in the 1912-25 period. The Wisconsin State Historical Society's Wisconsin Architecture & History Inventory lists thirty-one Wisconsin school buildings and additions designed by Van Ryn & De Gelleke in the years from 1898 to 1931, twenty-two of them in Milwaukee, plus three others built in the 1894-98 period from plans by Henry Van Ryn. It seems likely that the firm planned a number of western Upper Peninsula public school buildings in the early twentieth century as well, though the Michigan SHPO has not positively identified any others thus far.
The school district awarded the contract for Central's construction to Newman & Johnson on May 21, 1904, for the sum of $20,475 (exclusive of excavating, plumbing, and heating). The building, with its ten classrooms, assembly hall seating 500, and lab and recitation rooms, was to be completed by November 1st, 1904, and the contractors were to be docked $25 per day after that until it was completed. Despite this, the school was not completed and dedicated until April 1905. The old school was subsequently divided into three sections and moved away. The original part became a grocery store and the two wings each became a house.
The new school proved adequate for only a few years because of Iron Rivers' continuing iron mining-related growth. In May 1910 Foster Construction Co. of Milwaukee was contracted to build the two wings and boiler room, designed by Chicago architect John D. Chubb. Chubb (1869-1938) also specialized in school building design and planned a great number of schools in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois in the early twentieth century, including the Escanaba and Negaunee high schools in the western Upper Peninsula and the Niles High School and Battle Creek Vocational High School in southern Michigan.
Further growth required the installation of two "annexes" in 1923. These are probably the small separate wooden buildings that the October 1924 Sanborn map shows standing behind the boiler house. Perhaps they were precut, portable buildings, such as several Michigan and out-of-state companies were offering at the time. More were reportedly added later. The next Sanborn map, from October 1930, however, shows none of these buildings still present.
Central served as Iron River's high school until 1928, when a new high school building opened. After that it served as a primary and secondary school, gaining students with the closing of outlying one and two-room schools in the 1930s and also gaining and losing students with fluctuations in the economy that affected iron production and the region's economy and population. The building was closed at the end of the 1979-80 school year and has remained unoccupied except for storage since that time.
Building Description
The Central School is a massive red brick-walled building displaying a symmetrical U-shaped facade to the street. The gable and hip-roof school was built in two sections, in 1904-05 and 1910-11. The original building, a broad gable-roof section, forms most of the base of the U, and presents a slightly projecting central section capped by an octagonal cupola. Gable-roof wings at either end that form the sides of the U complement the original structure's design in their use of rubble fieldstone foundation and segmental-arch-head window openings, but the gable ends display Flemish gables finished with galvanized iron copings and ball finials.
The school faces south on Cayuga Street one block north of Adams Street, the main state highway route through Iron River, and two blocks north of the city's historic downtown, located along Genesee Street. The building fills the frontage between North 2nd and 3rd streets. A Lawn, with some now overgrown shrubs and one tree in the courtyard area between the wings, fronts the building. Concrete walkways run from a sidewalk that fronts the grounds up to the entrances. A walkway runs partway from the sidewalk toward the center of the front, then splits into two-quarter circles that connect with the two center front entrances, and additional walks run at right angles to the sidewalk up to the entrances at the south ends of the 1910-11 wings. The former school grounds and parking occupy level ground behind the building, and a separate brick boiler house with tall square-plan stack stands north of the building's northwest corner. The neighborhood surrounding the school is primarily residential.
Central stands on a foundation of rubble fieldstone that, capped by a slightly projecting concrete water table, rises just high enough above ground level to allow for half-height basement windows. The school's walls, including the segmental-arch-head openings that crown all the windows, including the basement ones, are built of red brick. The window sills and Classical ornament above the entrances appear to be of concrete. The cornices and gable copings are of galvanized metal, and the roof clad in asbestos shingles. The school's roof and floor structure are entirely of wooden construction. Despite the passage of twenty-five years since the building's last use, the roof remains serviceable, except for a few holes punched through by vandals, and the interior suffers almost no water damage.
The building is laid out in a broadly U-shaped form, with narrow north-south arms at each end of the front projecting southward from a main central section that is roughly rectangular in form. The roughly rectangular central part of the building, forming the broad base of the U, is the original school, built in 1904-05. Its front and rear facades each displays a shallow projection across the central part, the front one containing an entrance at either end, the rear the north side of the auditorium. A slight change in brick color at the east side of the westernmost window and at the west edge of the easternmost window in the central section's front marks the outer ends of the original building, and those eastern and westernmost windows the beginnings of the 1910-11 additions. As originally built, the school displayed hip roofs topping not only the central section, with its hip-roof dormers and octagonal cupola, but the slightly narrower side sections as well.
The gable-roof wings at either end, with their Flemish gables at the south ends and on the east and west sides at the north end, and the rectangular, flat-roof boiler house comprise the 1910-11 additions. The rubble fieldstone basement finish, and segmental-arch windows with their one-over-one double-hung windows - mostly in pairs - set beneath brickwork caps all closely match the original building. In the 1904-05 building as originally constructed, the front entrances were recessed and set within arched portals. As part of the 1910-11 work, these entrances were reconstructed with projecting canopies finished with Classical detailing to match the front and side entrances of the east and west additions.
The most distinguishing features of the wings' exterior finish are its Flemish gables with their rounded peaks and quarter-round elements and ball finials at the ends and apex. The copings and ball finials are all of galvanized metal. The two side gables are simplified versions of the front-facing ones, lacking the vertical pier or pilaster rising above a corbel and crowned by a ball finial at the peak.
The school building rises two stories above a basement containing a lunch room along with utility and storage spaces and janitor's quarters. The two floors embody similar floor plans aligned along a U-shaped corridor system. In each wing a corridor runs along the inner facade from the south entrance north to connect with an east-west corridor extending through the center of the 1904-05 building and out to entrances at the north end of the east and west wings. In the center front section of the 1904-05 building short staircases inside the two front entrances rise to the south side of the corridor at the first-floor level and double-run staircases run from the corridor's south side up to the second-story corridor's south side. There are also staircases in the building's northeast and northwest corners. The school offices, with their c. 1950 glass block windows, occupy the front space between the two staircases. Classrooms occupy the outer sides of the wings in both stories, the south end spaces above the entrances in the wings' second stories, the north side spaces on either side of the gym/auditorium, and the second story above the offices. The building contains nine classrooms downstairs and eleven upstairs.
Directly opposite the office area on the north side of the corridor is a gymnasium/auditorium, arranged with its side to the hallway and a stage with proscenium at the east end. A previous owner, concerned that the gymnasium's roof structure was unsound, pulled the wooden truss roof down. The roof's collapse in turn collapsed the gymnasium floor. The resulting debris remains in place inside the gymnasium space. The gymnasium's north wall remains in place but is bowed outward.
Beyond the ruined gymnasium/auditorium, the interior with its plastered walls and ceilings and wooden floors and plain dark stained wood trim remains largely intact except for the installation of acoustical tile ceilings in the upstairs hall and the destruction of nearly every pane of glass in the classroom doors and their transoms by vandals. The classrooms all feature wooden coat closets at the opposite ends from the blackboards. The broad east-west corridors and two main central staircases displayed tall paneled wainscoting. Most of this was stripped soon after the building closed as a school, but portions remain. This main corridor also retains its classical cornices with their dentils and egg-and-dart moldings.
Plans are afoot to rehabilitate the Central School for housing.
South front looking southwest (2006)
South and west facades (2006)
South front looking southeast (2006)
