BY CLARK MASON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
June 29, 2015, 2:27PM
It’s been 78 years since Florence
Nylander Bates attended a one-room schoolhouse in the hills west of
Healdsburg, but the memories are still vivid — the white dresses the
girls wore on graduation day, the play they staged in a meadow, the
potbelly stove they warmed themselves with on rainy days, and the
12-mile, daily round-trip journey she made on her horse to get to
school.
Bates, 90, sat outside the 132-year-old Daniels School on Mill Creek Road last week recalling those halcyon days.
“It was almost idyllic. You felt
protected and everybody was nice to you,” said Bates, who graduated from
the school’s eighth-grade class in 1938.
Florence Bates attended R.A. Daniels School off Mill Creek Road near Venado, west of Healdsburg, in 1938. The school had been in disrepair for years, but in the past few years, restoration has begin to preserve the old school,
Monday June 22, 2015.
(Kent Porter / Press Democrat) 2015
She is part of a handful of alumni
working to restore the schoolhouse, an effort that has regained momentum
thanks to a $14,500 grant from the Sonoma County Landmarks Commission,
coupled with donations and volunteer work.
A new roof and windows were
installed this spring on the schoolhouse, which was built from
old-growth redwood but exposed to the elements following its closure in
1951. Next comes siding and interior work, including a renewed
electricity supply, something the old structure only had after World War
II, when its kerosene lanterns were replaced.
“I’m making real progress,” said
Bonnie Cussins Pitkin, 71, who is spearheading the $40,000 restoration
effort for the cherished school, which she attended one year prior to
its closure, when she was in first grade.
New Windows at the R.A. Daniels School off Mill Creek Road west of
Healdsburg frames school alumnus Bonnie Pitkin, Monday June 22, 2015.
(Kent Porter / Press Democrat) 2015
Pitkin’s vision is to provide an
opportunity for local schoolchildren to take field trips to Daniels
School and learn what it was like to go to a one-room school, which were
common in rural areas across the country. At Daniels School, one
teacher taught academic basics to boys and girls in grades one through
eight, the typical arrangement.
In 1916, there were 120 one-room
schoolhouses in Sonoma County — including Daniels School — according to a
thesis written then by Stanford University student Tillman Elliott
Baker, who proposed reorganizing the school system.
Today, only a handful of the one-room schoolhouses survive.
Daniels School sits on a slope up
winding, redwood-lined Mill Creek Road, seven miles from the
intersection with Westside Road and a little more than eight miles from
Healdsburg.
Pitkin’s family owned it until they
donated the 16-by-26-foot building and a half-acre around it to the
Venado Historical Society, which draws its name from the surrounding
community established in the early 1900s.
These days, about the only time
Venado gets mentioned is when a meteorologist calls out the impressive
rainfall totals it can reap in winter storms. Located in a step of the
steep hills on the edge of the Cazadero “rainforest,” one TV weatherman
dubbed it “the rain capital of the Bay Area.”
Venado, Spanish for “deer,” was
named by mining engineer Stillman Batchellor, the first postmaster in
1921. By then, earlier generations that came to log the giant redwoods
and work a magnesite mine had departed.
The schoolhouse was built over eight
days in the spring of 1883, following a bitter fight over where it
should be located. The land was donated by Daniel Davis, a sea captain
from Maine whose wide interests landed him in Sonoma County, according
to Holly Hoods, curator for the Healdsburg Museum and Historical
Society, who wrote the grant proposal to help restore the school.
Daniels School Students From A Bygone Era
By 1903, the resident population dwindled and the school shut down for lack of pupils. But it reopened four years later and was rechristened in honor of Ray A. Daniels, a primary mover and shaker in re-establishing the school.
Fruit ranching and the tanbark industry brought new purpose, people and prosperity to upper Mill Creek, according to Hoods.
“The land that has been cleared has
proved fine fruit land, and vineyards and prune orchards are taking the
place of the redwood groves,” is how the Healdsburg Tribune described
Venado in 1925.
One of those who attended the school
at the time, from 1921 to 1929, was centenarian Stewart Wade, whose
father was a contractor and road builder who helped complete Mill Creek
Road.
“We had very good teachers; I
thought they were quite dedicated,” Wade said of the female instructors
who came for two-year stints and were put up in the homes of area
families.
Wade, who will turn 101 in November
and still works part time as a real estate agent, spoke by phone from
his Honolulu home this week.
He remembers there was no running water at the school.
“We had to carry a bucket from the
spring down the road,” he said, adding that all the children used the
same dipper to drink from. If one caught a cold, he said, they would all
get it.
The oldest boys in the school got
the job of janitor and were paid a few dollars a month for sweeping the
floors with redwood sawdust soaked in oil.
“The only playground we had was a
road where we played most of the time,” he said. “It was very safe in
those days. Cars didn’t travel very fast, and the wagons, we could hear
them coming from a long way.”
One wagon in particular, Wade said,
came from a Santa Rosa candy store, but it wasn’t there to satisfy the
children’s sweet tooth. It was during the Prohibition era and the sugar
hidden under a canvas in the back of the wagon went to a nearby still
where it was used to make booze, he said.
Wade also recalled the “fruit
tramps” who came to work the summer harvests. They hailed from the
Midwest and typically had one big car with all their possessions and
family inside. They were on a circuit that included the raisin harvest
in Fresno, with a swing through Sonoma County before heading to Oregon
for the pears and apples.
Usually, they had two or three kids with them, who would end up for a short time at Daniels School.
When Bates graduated in 1938, a
decade after Wade, Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, Babe Ruth was
coaching the Brooklyn Dodgers, a gallon of gas was 10 cents, and the
average price of a new car was $763.
But her family was poor and she was
still riding to school on her horse named Lady, sometimes having to
navigate the rain-swollen East Austin Creek with the help of her father
and sometimes getting home after dark.
“My sister would ride double with me
to the top of the ‘ladder,’” she said of the steep grade at the top of
Mill Creek Road where her older sister would get off the horse and walk
back home while Bates headed for the schoolhouse.
On the way to school, she said, “you
would talk to yourself, which I still do,” and look out for bird nests
to see if the eggs were hatching. “If I saw a rattlesnake, I killed it.
That’s what you did in those days,” she said.
Bates relishes those bygone school days.
“I remember the teacher taking us to the creek and reading out loud to us. I loved that,” she said.
She also lifted her forearm to show
the scar she has from when she fell onto a broken windshield near the
school and needed stitches to close the cut.
There hasn’t been a lesson taught in
the little schoolhouse since 1951, when unification brought five small
schools (Felta, West Side, Mill Creek, Junction and Daniels) together in
the Westside Union District.
Efforts began in the late 1990s to
rehabilitate the old schoolhouse. The foundation, porch and awning were
rebuilt, but renovations were delayed when the leader in the effort,
Flora May Cootes-Caletti, became ill.
In 2010, a fundraising drive was
renewed, with local contractors, including Mike Flower, donating time to
the rebuilding, ZFA Associates doing the structural engineering and
local businesses like Healdsburg Lumber Co. donating materials.
Contributions are still being
solicited to complete the interior work. And Pitkin is still looking to
hear from former Daniels School pupils.
Contributions can be made at danielsschool.blogspot.com, or sent to the Venado Historical Society, 8000 Mill Creek Road, Healdsburg 95448.
You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@clarkmas.
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