The 109-year-old former Elk River Public School was demolished last month.
Town residents said they were sad to see the once beautiful building torn down, but that there was no other choice for the deteriorating icon.
“We hated to see it go, but it was in such bad shape that it had to go,” said Della Kreisher, a longtime Elk River resident and former city councilor and mayor.
Kreisher’s husband, Forrest, known by most as “Babe,” graduated from the school in 1951, and continues to live with Della in the 125-person town about 50 miles east of Moscow.
Della said their two daughters graduated from the Elk River school as well.
The school was built in 1911 and closed in 1990 when the Elk River School District consolidated with the Whitepine School District.
Wayne and Gayle Gallagher own the property, according to the Clearwater County Assessor’s Office. Wayne owns Gallagher Welding in Princeton. Shelley McLam and her husband, Curt, who live in Elk River, partnered with the Gallagher couple to purchase the property, according to a Facebook post by Shelley McLam.
The couples could not be reached for this story.
Elk River Mayor Dave Brown said the building was a safety hazard and if the Gallagher and McLam couples had not bought it and demolished it, the city would have had to do the work and seek payment for the demolition costs from the owners.
Brown said the owners allowed residents to retrieve parts from the school and the owners donated several items, like the school sign at the top of the structure, to the Elk River Historical Society.
Items such as cabinets also were salvaged from the school for the new Elk River Volunteer Fire Department building, Brown said.
Tom Morris was one of the residents who salvaged wood from the school.
Morris, a 1972 graduate of the school, shared the same sentiments of Kreisher and Brown. It was sad to see the building go, but it was time.
He said he wished it could have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places and that it was maintained over the years.
The building’s bell tower caved in, leaving water to pour into the building and ruining wood on the interior, Morris said.
“I didn’t see an eyesore,” Morris said. What I saw was a beautiful building that didn’t get taken care of.”
According to a 2017 Daily News story about the school, Greg Eck, a Clearwater Historical Museum board member in Orofino and 1969 Elk River graduate, said the school consisted of three levels — a recreation room, kitchen and bathrooms in the basement, elementary and middle school students on the main floor and high school students on the top floor. Since the high school was upstairs, Eck joked it was a “true high school.”
The 2017 article said it was owned by Bill Pearson, who residents said is an elderly man who lives in western Washington and owned the former school since the 1990s.
Pearson had plans for the building as a bed and breakfast, but his insistence that his project include a go-kart track — or something similar — circling the building ran afoul of the city council, who thought it sounded dangerous, said Rick Trott, an Elk River city councilman at the time of the article and graduate from the school in 1976. Pearson went away angry, and has seldom been back.
Trott said the school sat empty for a couple years after it closed in 1990. His wife leased the school from the city and operated a bed and breakfast with gift shops in the different rooms from about 1992 to 1995, Trott said in the 2017 article.
He said Pearson bought the school in the late 1990s and planned to operate something similar to what Trott’s wife had done. But after disputes with the council, Trott said Pearson told the councilors he was not going to do anything with the property if he could not build the track around the school. Trott said Pearson used the school as a getaway once in a while but eventually quit returning to the property.
Garrett Cabeza can be reached at gcabeza@dnews.com.
