MIDDLETOWN >> Tony Pierucci, curator of Lake County Museums, and David Leonard, principal of Cobb Mountain Elementary School, will offer a broad scope of the challenges faced in bringing the best possible education to the children of Lake County. They will appear at Gibson Museum, Sunday, July 17, 3 to 5 p.m.
Pierucci has compiled photos from the collections of the Courthouse Museum in Lakeport and the Schoolhouse Museum in Lower Lake, together with prized pictures procured from other resources and informative captions, to present Lake County Schoolhouses.
Leonard will update neighbors on the challenges faced by Cobb School after 30 percent of its students and staff were burned out in the Valley Fire. He, like Superintendent Catherine Stone, had been in office only since the first of September when the fire occurred. The Leonard family home was among those destroyed.
Pierucci’s book is too rich to appropriately describe. It is hard to imagine the lives of those barefoot children posed in front of teeny one-room wood-frame schoolhouses. It astonishes with a reminder that public high schools were introduced as late as 1907. We can share the pride of those who struggled to gain the funding to upgrade and modernize our educational system and its facilities. For oldsters, it brings poignant memories of their own childhoods.
Old photos seem to have almost universal appeal. There’s the nostalgia, the wonder, the recognition, the learning that is offered few other ways. History, as the preservation of the past, has decidedly benefitted from the invention of photography. Pierucci’s extensive, well researched text affords the compelling history behind the photos.
The book, released only June 27, is among recent additions to Arcadia Publishing’s popular Images of America series, which now numbers more than 7500 books of hyper-local history. Three other Lake County histories are in the series: Lake County, The Pomo of Lake County, The Resorts of Lake County. Those, and Lake County Schoolhouses, may be purchased at Gibson Museum, Ely Stage Stop, Courthouse Museum and Schoolhouse Museum. The usual price is $22.
Gibson Museum & Cultural Center is located at 21267 Calistoga St. (Hwy 29), directly opposite Middletown’s Community Center. For further information, call Nina Bouska at 987-2349.
