DENVER — Peppered throughout Colorado, predominantly on the eastern plains and in the northwest portion of the state, are hundreds of rural, one-room schoolhouses.
Some of them are almost lost, having deteriorated after being suddenly abandoned decades ago. Others are seemingly frozen in time.
Hohlt Koehn, one of the many talented photographers in Denver7’s Discover Colorado | Through Your Photos photography group on Facebook, has shared a series of photos that caught the attention of this author.
To learn more about the buildings, we enlisted the help of History Colorado – and specifically Eric Newcombe, the organization’s state and national register coordinator, and Dr. Rachael Storm, its head of curatorial services and curator of business and industry.
A brief history of Colorado’s rural schoolhouses
Rural schoolhouses in Colorado date back more than 150 years to when Colorado was a territory. They “reflect the pattern of exploration and settlement” in Colorado, Newcombe said.
The buildings are woven into the fabric of our statehood.
“Having those community infrastructures in the development of the state of the territory counted toward them applying for statehood,” Storm said. “It showed that they were setting up communities and families that would turn into towns.”
In Colorado’s early years as a state, its legislature set aside state-owned land to build schoolhouses so children didn’t need to walk more than a few miles to get to school, Storm said.
The number of school districts in Colorado ballooned to more than 2,000 in the 1930s.
Many of Colorado’s rural schoolhouses were abandoned in the wake of the School District Reorganization Act of 1949. The law was, of course, put in place in 1949, and then amended at least four times over the ensuing 16 years, according to a report by the Colorado School Finance Project. The number of school districts in the state was slashed by nearly 90%, from 1,721 in 1949 to 181 in 1965, according to the report.
A ‘preservation ethic’ in Colorado
So, why are so many of these buildings left standing 60 years later?
“We’ve got a great concentration of well preserved ones, and it's largely thanks to the preservation ethic here in Colorado,” Newcombe said.
Newcombe helps identify historic places around the state, then evaluates them for their historical significance and nominates them for inclusion on either or both of the state and national register. A document called a multiple property documentation form details the cultural significance of many mid-century rural schoolhouses in the state, he said.
But the preservation of Colorado’s one-room schoolhouses doesn’t actually have much to do with the register of historic places.
“The state and national register actually doesn't afford any legal protection to a building. It's an honorary process that is meant to recognize the history, but it doesn't place any laws or restrictions on the property owner,” Newcombe said. “And so most often, what we see is that it's the people of that place recognizing through the generations the intrinsic value that this place had, and they maintain it throughout that time.”
‘They’re meaningful’
The preservation of these schoolhouses, of course, is not just about their history. It is also about a unique community connection.
“The cultural significance of schoolhouses is tremendous,” Storm said. “Schoolhouses were never just schoolhouses. They were churches, they were community centers, they were town halls, they were multipurpose buildings that [...] if you lived in that community, [you use] that school your whole life.”
Koehn feels that connection as much as anyone. He’s a Colorado Springs-based photographer who fell in love with rural schoolhouses during a trip to Leadville a couple of years back. For Hohlt, who works as a crossing guard at Odyssey Elementary in Colorado Springs, it’s a blending of the past and present.
“I work out of school so it's interesting to think about the educational history we've come from,” he said.
He is also a traumatic brain injury survivor after a bad car crash during his childhood.
“I stick to myself, so I had to find a hobby,” he said. “I took up photography because I just love it.”
That hobby has turned into a full-fledged passion. Over Labor Day weekend, he drove 500 miles touring the state looking for schoolhouses to photograph. He hopes to one day turn his collection of photos into a book to teach others the largely unknown past of these buildings.
The future of Colorado’s schoolhouses
Dr. Storm said her favorite ideas for the future are that communities celebrate these buildings and continue to use them in some way.
“So, people turning them into houses, people using them as museums or historic sites or community centers or town halls – very much the things that they've been used for in the past, but being repurposed for or re-envisioned,” she said.
“And I love that continuity. I love that continuity between the way it's been used in the past and the way that we envision using those in the future.”
- This story first aired as part of a Denver7+ special presentation of Discover Colorado. Watch the full episode in the video player below: