During this summer of 2015, several volunteers have been laboring on converting a small wooden building once used as a gunshop, into a schoolhouse. It won’t be part of a school district, but it will be a place of learning. The Historical Society will display Windham school artifacts it has been collecting since 1967 and volunteer staff of the society will use the building for history lessons and special events. In order to be renovated, however, all the town codes and restrictions and fees must be adhered to. This has taken a long time, but is kind of like it was nearly 250 years ago, when the first mention of building a schoolhouse in Windham was in the town records.

It was October of 1770 when the vote was affirmative, to raise 200 pounds (English money in those days) to construct a schoolhouse. When the town again gathered in 1772, they voted to finish shingling the schoolhouse and clapboard the whole building – Richard Dole was paid 20 British pounds for his labor. Richard Dole was an ancestor of future historians Samuel and Frederick Dole.

In 1790 it was voted to give the old schoolhouse to a widow named “Young.” She converted the schoolhouse into a dwelling, and after she died, an old Scottish tailor named Angus lived there. History doesn’t tell us how long he lived there or if he owned the property, but it was finally taken down and disappeared from history.

Windham Historical Society got organized in 1967 and ever since then, has received thousands of donations of materials from Windham’s past. Many of these items are school-related and include high school yearbooks (do you know the date of the very first one?), school books, book bags, small hand-held devices called slates, chalk, inkwells, flash cards, very old school desks and chairs, long benches, school bells from Anderson, Pleasant River and other district schools, globes, portraits of presidents, and hundreds of school photos – both groups and individuals. The renovated and upgraded “schoolhouse” will be the perfect place for displays of these artifacts.

The air around today’s Village Green “schoolhouse” is filled with the smells of wood; salvaged materials from ancient structures are being used when possible; the walls await the large slates, and soon, Windham will celebrate its newest place of learning. The sounds of the old school bells and children’s voices will be reminiscent of that first school building, in the late 1700s.

Stop by and visit your Society – open Tuesdays from 10 a.m.-noon, or Wednesday and Thursday, 9 a.m.-noon. It’s happening in Windham!

Volunteers, from left, Jim Hanscom, Dave Tanguay and Ernie Mitchell have spent some hot days this summer renovating a building on the Windham Historical Society’s Village Green. When completed, it will be used for a “one room school” and venue for display of historic school artifacts. (Not shown in photo is Sam Simonson.)Courtesy photo