I sneeze. I can barely keep my Assistant Curator, Whitney, within the faint beam of light cast by my flashlight. She’s been crawling in the dark for about 30 minutes—I had given up in 10. The smell of history is contained within the puffs of fine dust that waft up as she shuffles her way around wood posts and piles of trash.
You really can’t find that kind of dirt just anywhere — it’s a variety that is exclusively found in the basement and crawlspaces of historic structures. It’s a combination of dust, bits of cloth and animal hair that has sifted down through floor boards over the course of decades. After this unique filtration process, the dirt settles in clumps and begins to mature into an earthy musky soup.
We’ve been exploring the crawlspace of the Lower Lake Historic Schoolhouse for several days now. Rather, Whitney has. After my brief tour over the first pile of sheet metal and broken bricks, I retreated to a comfortable upturned bucket located directly under the hatchway through which we had first entered this underworld. I had just enough clearance to sit upright, notebook in hand, ready to mark notes on the scaled map.
Consider it a perk of being the boss.
In reality, both Whitney and I are perfectly suited to our tasks. Whitney is more at home crawling around and finding artifacts, while I am more of a bigger-picture person. I’d rather be with the map than digging for the treasure. In this case, we start with the treasure first and make the map from that. Whitney, scrambling elbow over knee from wall to wall, measures the distances and shouts them out for me to mark down. Pretty soon, the marks on the notebook in my lap begin to reveal the foundation of the school.
The schoolhouse was built on three brick piers, each one resting firmly on a shelf of sandstone bedrock. These piers break the crawlspace into fourths, with the central pier running the entire length of the building. The trunks of the oak trees that once dominated the hillside on which the school now sits are preserved in place here below the building. I guess it was too much work to rip them out so the builders in 1876-77 simply built the school around and over them.
Evidence of the building process is preserved in small wood shavings carved from the redwood beams using planes and chisels. These delicate shavings have remarkably survived the decades in the cool, dry crawlspace. Hundreds of square-head nails and iron brackets are also buried in the clumps of dirt, which Whitney disturbs in her frantic crawling.
The most remarkable artifact uncovered in our search was a crumpled iron saw blade, used during the original construction of the building.
More ubiquitous than even square-head nails, though, are the broken pieces of brick that line the crawlspace from wall to wall. The burnt surface on many of them is evidence of a tragic period in the school’s history. Even more evocative of this tragedy is the six-foot long charred redwood beam that still lies half buried in the rubble.
In the fall of 1876 construction on the three-room schoolhouse was well underway. It was quite an undertaking. Started with the backing of local newspaper-owner Leslie Phineas Nichols, when completed the “Nichols School House” would be the largest, most modern school in all of Lake County. Constructed of brick dug and fired just half a mile away, the schoolhouse in Lower Lake would remain the only school in Lake County built of a material other than wood until the end of the 1910s, when the first concrete schools began to appear. Even today, the schoolhouse towers above the town of Lower Lake and it is not too difficult to imagine the awe it would have inspired at a time when the only nearby buildings were squat wood stores and small farm houses. Indeed, for decades later people would note the fine quality of the town’s public schoolhouse anytime they mentioned the community of Lower Lake.
All of this nearly fell into ruin when, in January 1877, a vagrant by the name of Goforth spent the night in the nearly-complete building and mysteriously started a fire. The fire roared unchecked and the intensity of it cracked the brick, warped the tin sheets that lined the ceiling and reduced one ton wood beams to toothpicks.
Newspaper articles of the period don’t intimate how much damage was caused by the fire, but the presence of so much charred brick and ceiling tiles below the floor suggests that at least a portion of the walls had to be removed and reconstructed. The amount of brick rubble — and the fact that it covers the entire footprint of the building — also suggests that it came from this disaster, not the 1906 earthquake that just destroyed the bell tower.
Not to be deterred, the citizens of Lower Lake quickly passed bond measures to cover the extra cost of reconstruction and the schoolhouse opened in late 1877. Perhaps feeling the pressure to open for school, some corners were cut during the rebuild: the burnt posts that supported the floor were left in place and the brick rubble merely left as it had fallen. The charred beams, brick and tin tiles remain underneath the building — now a museum — as testament to the unfortunate event that nearly ended the history of this building before it even began.
I sneeze again. The darned dust, however fine its vintage, will give me a headache for days to come. But it’s worth it. It always is.
Want to see the building for yourself? Come to Tony Pierucci’s book signing on July 8 at 6:00-8:00 P.M. at the Lower Lake Historic Schoolhouse Museum. You can buy your copy of Lake County Schoolhouses and listen to a presentation on the history of early education in Lake County. The Lower Lake Historic Schoolhouse Museum is open Wednesday-Saturday from 11:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M. and can be reached at 707-995-3565.
