March Friday History: Mattocks School
In 1964 Kraus-Anderson moved St. Paul’s Maddocks School House from the corner of Randolph and Snelling Avenues to the site of the new Highland Park High School a mile and a half south down Snelling.
Some construction projects are historic, and some projects are historical. Kraus-Anderson has completed more historic projects – more architectural landmarks, more projects that have had a lasting influence on the Twin Cities, than any other construction company, but KA also has more than its share of historical projects – projects that reflect history or are commissioned for historical purposes.
Moving an old schoolhouse from one place to another in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood didn’t change the world, but it was historical.
Reserve Township
There is an origin story for the city of St. Paul that goes something like this: After the treaties of 1837 were ratified, all those settlers not engaged in military matters were encouraged to leave the vicinity of Fort Snelling and claim whatever land they were able to. Several families chose the area around fountain cave (present-day Randolph Avenue and Shepard Road) as being close to the conveniences and safety of the fort, while not being within its military reservation. After a couple years, during which time these settlers raised their livestock and operated their taverns, the authorities at Fort Snelling informed them that they had not settled far enough from the fort and that they must again move. After a display of defiance, with their smoking cabins at their backs, these hardy unfortunates crowded in with their fellow frontier settlers down the river, where, at what is really a better steamboat landing anyway, they soon constructed a chapel and named it St. Paul.
In the 1840s, when Minnesota was surveyed and divided into townships, this became Reserve Township, initially verboten to build upon by the authorities at the fort, and eventually something of a suburb to the new city of St. Paul.
This was the context, in 1871, when the people of Reserve Township built a one-room schoolhouse out of stone on the southwest corner of Randolph and Snelling Avenues. Initially called Webster School, the name was changed to Mattocks in 1887 when it was folded into the St. Paul system. Reverand John Mattocks was a prominent minister and educator in early St. Paul.
By the 1920s, the area around Mattocks School drastically outgrew its little schoolhouse. In 1923, when a new Mattocks school building was completed, nobody had the heart to knock down the little Italianate schoolhouse. And so, to borrow a phrase from Larry Millet, Mattocks had “a 30-year tour of duty as an American Legion post.”
Whether it was an instinct for preservation generated by the aggressive urban renewal efforts of the era, or simply the irresistible charm of this small stone schoolhouse, the citizens of St. Paul raised the money to have the building moved. Saint Paul Public Schools agreed to incorporate the old schoolhouse into the campus of the new Highland Park High School.
Proving that the size of a building does not necessarily determine the scope of the project, Kraus-Anderson of St. Paul took apart the old schoolhouse one stone at time and reassembled it one mile south.
The Mattocks School project was completed in 1964, so the reassembled Mattocks building has now served for sixty years as both a classroom and an historic monument.
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