Lake County >> Don’t be fooled by the title, Lake County Museums Curator Antone Pierucci’s new book, “Lake County Schoolhouses,” is about much more than education. Yes, he was inspired to write it after scoring his job with the county museums — someone who works for a schoolhouse museum should know all there is to know about Lake County education, he figured reasonably — but the Historic Lower Lake Schoolhouse Museum played a much larger role in the community than just teaching children.
Up until the 1910s, schoolhouses were the largest public buildings in an area, serving as meeting centers, town halls, places to celebrate and mourn. People were born in the schoolhouse and died in the schoolhouse. And until the ‘50s, they were the center of communal life. From the age of 5 or 6 up until a child turned 18, they were educated in the same building, by the same teacher, with the same friends and family.
“This was an important part of growing up, and it was more nuclear,” Pierucci said. “It’s difficult for people to understand the importance of public schools for the creation of a community.”
But he hopes his book will change that. Lake County Schoolhouses is part of the “Images of Arcadia” series, which is basically “a history lover’s picture book,” Pierucci said. The book features both images and text.
Though the pictures are plentiful, the words are just as important. It’s easy enough to look at a picture and pick up on surface-level details like date and the age of the kids. It’s another thing entirely to delve into what that photo means for the community at large. “The challenge was to understand what the pictures were about and what they said,” Pierucci said.
The ways in which people chose to educate their children said quite a bit about an area and about the struggles unique to that community. “You really can’t understand the history of schools without learning also about the history of the area,” Pierucci said. “People who would want to buy my book, if they’re going to expect a picture book with captions, that’s not what they’re going to get. They’re going to get a history and a story.”
Acquiring the photographs was the easier part of the process, thanks to a man named Henry Mauldin, who had collected and organized pictures for the museums in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. But the photos had yet to be published — until now. “It’s not enough just to gather photographs and go around and gives presentations on them,” Pierucci said. But when they’re printed in a book, “it becomes part of the collective knowledge in the area.”
Photographs do have their drawbacks though. While “Lake County Schoolhouses” features a small section on segregation and racism, Pierucci had wanted to address the heavy subject more. But people didn’t take pictures relating to the topic, for obvious reasons.
Still, he hopes readers leave the book with the understanding that, like the rest of the country, education in Lake County “didn’t always mean education for all,” he said, adding, “But the community had their own struggles. They made their own system that fit the rural character of the area.”
Mauldin had also done a significant amount of footwork on the subject of Lake County education when he created a booklet on the topic in 1977. He’d gone through the minutes of countless Board of Supervisors meetings (BOS) — a BOS meeting was required every time a new school was introduced — plus yearly records from Sacramento, which detailed education in Lake County.
Pierucci, too, dove into state and local government records, newspaper articles and court documents. It took a year for the book to come together. The result, Pierucci hopes, is a reading experience that transports the reader back in time, much like first stepping into the Lower Lake Schoolhouse Museum, when you feel as though you’ve found yourself in a different era. “I hope the book captures a similar essence of what it’s like to walk into the building for the first time,” he said.
Lake County Schoolhouses will be available for purchase beginning Sunday at Lakeport’s Historic Courthouse Museum and the Lower Lake Historic Schoolhouse Museum. Over the month of July, Pierucci will be having book signings at the following times and locations: July 8, 6-8 p.m. at the schoolhouse museum; July 9, 2-4 p.m. at the Courthouse Museum; July 16, 2-4 p.m. at the Lakeport library; and July 17, 3-5 p.m. at the Gibson Museum in Middletown.
Books will also be available for purchase at the signings. Proceeds from books sold at the museums or signings will go to the various nonprofits supporting the museums.
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
