October 29, 2014 at 3:05 p.m.
Old Curran School remains as a nod to Rhinelander's earliest settler
Old Curran School remains as a nod to Rhinelander's earliest settler
By By Kyle Rogers-
Since 2007 it has been an office park whose current occupants include the Lumberjack Resource Conservation and Development Council, and Spectrum Physical Therapy. One tenant is the afterschool program Old School Arts and Learning Center, which is especially fitting since for decades education was the building's sole purpose. And education is synonymous with the Curran name.
Curran was one of 13 children growing up in a poor family in New York state in the 1840s. He received only the "bare essentials" of a formal education, recounts R. Joe Botsford in "The Curran Story: The Beginning of Rhinelander," and the expectation for the boys in the family was to leave home once they had reached an age where they could fend for themselves. That happened for John Curran at age 14.
Because of his humble beginnings, education was important to Curran. He continuously worked to make up for his lack of a formal education and was a voracious reader throughout his life. When it came time to educate his own children, he took matters into his own hands. The Curran family and a trapper who lived nearby, Martin Lynch, were the only white settlers living along the Wisconsin River between Grandfather Falls (north of Merrill) and Eagle River in the 1870s. Curran had a one-room log schoolhouse built - the area's first - in the late 1870s south of his home, and he brought to the area Rhinelander's first teacher, a relative of his wife's from Canada, to instruct his children, Lynch's, and some of the area's native children.
By 1883, the city of Rhinelander had been formally established and the newly formed school board decided to build a one-room school at the corner of Brown and Frederick streets where the police and fire departments now sit. It was named the Curran School. A three-room structure replaced it a couple years later, and it was eventually moved to the current Oneida Avenue location. But the old Curran School as we know it today is actually the third building to be located on the site. When the school burned down in 1904, a brick building replaced it. That building was also victimized by a fire, in 1932. The building we see today was erected in 1935, still bearing the Curran name though Rhinelander's first pioneer moved away from the area in 1901 and spent the final three decades of his life in Everett, Wash. (There too he was an educational trailblazer. He served several terms as president of Everett's school board and aided in the construction of a new high school.)
Despite its present day function as an office park, the Curran Professional Park continues to bring back memories of school days long past. There are, of course, the lockers that still line the walls. There's the porcelain drinking fountain on the second floor, a classic model that would now be considered a relic of the 20th century. And on many days you're likely to find Tina Werres manning the desk on the first floor of the building, in between glass displays featuring old Rhinelander school photos, Curran School history and information about the building's transition into office space.
Werres is among those Rhinelander residents who still remember going to school in the building. On a recent afternoon Werres pointed down the hall toward the south end of the building and recalled how she sat on the outside steps and cried after her first day of kindergarten more than a half century ago because she didn't know the way back home. Her brother was supposed to come get her but forgot. Eventually the teacher found her and got in touch with her mother.
Werres also remembers practicing duck-and-cover drills (the sign identifying the old school as a fallout shelter is still on the outside of the building), and standing in line to receive goiter pills (back in the days when there was concern about children being iodine-deficient, before iodine became prevalent in things like table salt). And since Werres grew up around the downtown area, Curran School was always the meet-up spot, even after the school week ended. "The field at the school. That's where all the kids met on Saturdays," she says.
Those memories may still be fresh, but what is lacking is physical documentation of those times. Werres says while the glass displays at the Curran building contain old black and white photos of Rhinelander student classes of the past, they are not necessarily specific to Curran School. She encourages anyone with old Curran mementos to consider contributing to the displays.
"We have some old school photos from the time, but they're not from Curran," Werres says. "If we can, we would like them to be from Curran."
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