March 19, 2024

Smyrna school house fire

Rounding the bend as Mormon Trail merges with 310th Ave, a lank and lonely figure appeares to the east. A tall, thin chimney rises up from a foundation covered in charred rubble. It is all that remains of the Smyrna school house, one of the oldest one-room schools in the state.

“It wasn’t secure, but it was solid,” said Bryant Bay of Woodburn, who stopped by the paper last week to share the news.

He’s among several in town who thinks it was “torched,” though officials have yet to weigh in on the official cause of the fire.

“The building is gone, but the community is there. Hundreds of kids went to school there,” said Bay.

The former military policeman and volunteer firefighter helped mow the lawn at the site, just across from Smyrna Cemetery. He would like to see it converted into a park or information center, he said. Unfortunately, in order to make those kinds of changes, the community will have to track down the plot’s owners.

“The Smyrna school is right on the Mormon Trail,” said Don Reasoner of The Iowa Mormon Trail Association. “The association bought it. Then we sold it to someone who said he was going to make it into a house, but I don’t think anything came of it.”

The original school was built in the late 1850s with an upgrade later in 1906.

“The school directors of Smyrna Independent School district of Franklin Township will receive bids til 14 July 1906 for erection of a school house. The old to be used in the new building as far as it will go. The house must be completely by 9/1/1906,” read an entry in the July 5, 1906, edition of the Osceola Sentinel, page 4.

“The school house was one of the oldest,” said Marie White of the Clarke County Historical Society. “In the country school book, the list of names for students starts in 1894. The school was closed in 1947.”

After the building was retired, it remained a community center. Voting for the township took place at the Smyrna school house up until it was sold. Even back then they had a problem with vandals.

In a colorful look at rural voting, Des Moines Tribune writer Larry Fruhling detailed the new lanterns and wood burning stove moved into the school in anticipation of upcoming elections. In a piece entitled, “Picturesque Iowa polling place,” that ran in the November, 1976 edition of the Des Moines Tribune, receiving board members discussed the number of items that had gone missing from the school over the years. The thefts weren’t limited to trinkets. They included a coal-burning stove and 1,000 pounds of its fuel.

It didn’t take much for the community to attribute the fire to vandals.

Weldon Volunteer Fire Department contained the blaze, but weren’t able to save the aging structure. Today, the chimney and the foundation are all that’s left of the school, and an odd metal disc embedded in the top step — which afforded children just enough time to scrape the mud off their boots before lessons began.