Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
An old county schoolhouse has been restored and is now open to the public as part of a senior project for Colton High School.
Savannah Chadwick, 17, led the effort to reclaim what had become a shed for combine headers on her grandfather’s property four miles outside Uniontown.
The one-room Taufen School closed in 1938, after 46 years in operation.
Later, it was moved a hundred yards to the existing site, in order for Hubert Meyer, Chadwick’s great grandfather, to build a house on the property.
Ever since then, 1949, it has been a shed, then a shop building on the farm when the combine headers got too big.
“To me it’s always been a shop until my project started,” said Chadwick. “Then it became a schoolhouse.”
The work began in the summer of 2012 with help from her younger brothers Brady and Reece, cousins Zach Devorak and Jake Meyer, her uncle Tom Meyer and grandparents John and Barb Meyer.
The first tasks involved cleaning out the building, scraping, re-painting and fixing windows on the former 20 X 30-foot schoolhouse.
Grandfather John performed structural repair.
The original stove and chalkboards were still inside.
Two years later, with the project complete, Chadwick held an open house Sept. 13-14. Four former students of the old School District 134 building attended.
It will now be open by appointment through the end of October, and then beginning again next April.
Part of the finishing touches were to find original or period-specific items to decorate it with.
“Everything is how it should be,” Chadwick said.
The interior and exterior were painted in the same colors which the students said it was.
“We pretty much put it back to what they remember,” said Barb Meyer, Savannah’s grandmother.
In addition, an original desk school bell was donated back to the Taufen School by the Warren Taufen family of Colfax. Chadwick even got a hold of the grade books from the last years of the school’s operation.
For desks, she took out an ad in Ruralite, a publication of Clearwater Power Company. Chadwick heard back from a man in Albany, Ore. with 300 early 1900s desks. But there was a closer response – a man in Orofino, Idaho, also had a collection of desks of the same period. A longtime employee of the Orofino School District, he had taken them home instead of disposing of them.
Chadwick also researched what the Taufen School and its education was like, through interviewing the former students and seeking old photos and scrapbooks, as well as taking a trip to the Eastern Washington University archives with her grandmother.
Locating the former students, Chadwick sent out eight surveys and received six back. Then she interviewed each of the respondents.
All the while, the time with her grandmother was appreciated.
“Definitely working with my grandparents,” Chadwick said, of her favorite part of the project. “You can’t buy time. It’s not something that every kid gets to do.”
She indicated that the hardest part was finding pictures.
“Grandma knew the people that might have photos,” Chadwick said. “We had to contact them and ask them to look through your pictures, or your parents’ or grandparents’ pictures.”
Originally, the schoolhouse was known as the Heitstumann School, after the owners of the land it was on. It was later named Taufen after a prominent school board member.
In addition to the building’s restoration, Chadwick is raising money to complete her senior project with a Taufen Schoolhouse Scholarship Fund. Her goal is to be able to give one $200 scholarship each year for 10 years.
To raise further funding, she will raffle a child’s wagon made by Terri Frei on Dec. 19 at halftime of a Colton High School basketball game.
Those interested in scheduling an appointment to see the schoolhouse are asked to send a message to barb.babinski@gmail.com.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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