Washington School is one of a kind

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Fred Hibler of Arcata was a student at the old Washington School in the 1920s. The school will be honored in May with a reunion of its former students. The gathering is part of the Humboldt Senior Resource Center's year-long 25th anniversary celebration. The Senior Resource Center now occupies the building which it purchased from the City of Eureka last year for $1.

Records for Washington School's first year, 1903-1904, show the school's enrollment included 51 boys and 35 girls as well as 21 children under the age of five. A teacher earned $85 per month. By the time the school closed in 1938, the teachers pay had increased markedly to roughly $112 per month or $1,340 a year.

Of the six Eureka elementary schools built between 1900 and 1910, all named for US presidents, only Washington remains-some 61 years after officials deemed the schools fire traps and unceremoniously closed them. Lafayette, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin and Marshall Schools soon became little more than memories.

"An election was held to replace the other five schools, some of which were several years newer than Washington School," Glen Nash wrote in the Sept.-Oct. 1986 Humboldt Historian, the journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society.

Washington School around 1910.

During World War II the former school at the corner of California and Del Norte Streets became an Army barracks for troops on leave, before becoming a maintenance shop for the city schools and finally, in 1983, the home of the Humboldt Senior Resource Center.

It's not hard to imagine the grand old building awash in children and the ABCs. Arcata resident Fred Hibler doesn't have to imagine the scenario-he lived it. His first six years of school, beginning in 1924, were spent at Washington School and his mother Grace McGeorge taught at the school before she married and had a family.

Hibler remembered huge stacks of firewood stored against the outside of school to be used in the basement's wood-burning furnace. When the morning bell rang, the students would line up at the back door of the ground floor and prepare for a march to their classrooms, girls on one side, boys on the other.

The middle floor was designated for the first-, second- and third-grade classes, while the upper grades ruled the top floor. Hibler said he didn't have much call to visit with the principal Miss Molly Flannigan, whose office was in the southwest corner of the top floor. He did, however, recall the rules being iron clad.

Eureka resident Maxine Moore Wyman attended first-through-sixth grade at Washington School beginning in 1918-just in time for the influenza epidemic, a scary time for young children. Maxine remembered being required to wear cloth masks to school.

Maxine said she lived just two blocks from the school and remembered playing outside the school in the playground, the area now occupied by the parking lot.

One-time article Copyright 1999 by Humboldt Senior Resource Center.