Raspberry Schoolhouse, Moved to Live Again
Near Bayfield, Wisconsin
A small sign here marks where Raspberry Schoolhouse once stood, built in eighteen ninety-six to educate children in this remote corner of Bayfield County near Lake Superior. Rural one-room schoolhouses like this one were the backbone of education in nineteenth-century Wisconsin, serving farming and logging families spread across the countryside. In nineteen seventy-six, rather than letting the building decay, preservationists carefully dismantled and relocated it to Old World Wisconsin, a living-history museum near Eagle in Waukesha County.
There it was restored and integrated into the museum's Norwegian area, where it still stands today as part of a collection of historic immigrant buildings. The story of the Raspberry schoolhouse is the story of hundreds of Wisconsin rural schools, most of which did not survive: this one was saved by being moved.
