Dry Mills Schoolhouse: One Room, One Hundred Years
Near Portland, Maine
The small clapboard building on Game Farm Road in Gray is a one-room district schoolhouse built around eighteen fifty-seven. It operated as a primary school for one hundred two years, closing in nineteen fifty-nine, and briefly served as a preschool in the nineteen seventies before the Gray Historical Society recognized what it was. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-six.
It was relocated to a protected site in nineteen ninety and restored in the following years. Inside, period desks, old photographs, and a copy of a nineteenth-century teacher's journal give a clear picture of how rural Maine educated its children before consolidation swept away the district system entirely.
