Kansas One-Room Schoolhouse Project

In the early 1900s, Kansas was home to more than 8,000 one-room and rural schoolhouses. Consolidation and a population shift to urban centers left most of the schools vacant and abandoned. Today, only about 800 of those structures remain. Some have been beautifully restored or repurposed as homes, community centers or museums, but others have been left to slowly deteriorate. Despite the poor condition of many of the more isolated schools, there seems to be a general reluctance to tear them down — perhaps in hopes that some future generation will take up the task of restoring them. Time is running out, and their numbers are dwindling along with the aging students who attended them.

 

My goal is to locate, photograph, and paint (using watercolor and ink) at least one schoolhouse in each of the state’s 105 counties.  With my cocker spaniel sidekick, Libby, so far we have visited 305 schools across 89 counties.  (A list of those visited schools along with their mapped location is available here.) The gallery below shows a few examples of recent work.