Several months of town labor during tough times 85 years ago in Buxton were reduced to a pile of rubble in one day on Tuesday when the Samuel D. Hanson School was demolished.
“This is a very sad day for Buxton – a great waste of resources,” said Jan Hill, president of the Buxton-Hollis Historical Society.
Buxton laborers built the school in 1930 as a replacement for one lost earlier that year. The original Hanson School, built in 1913, had been destroyed by fire. According to historical society information, the town had $15,000 in insurance money and borrowed $11,000 “at the height of the Great Depression” to rebuild the school on the same foundation.
A brick gym was annexed in 1952. The school was a landmark in a historical stretch along rural Route 22 in Buxton Center.
The building once served as Buxton High School, a junior high, and in recent years as an elementary school. But, classes there were discontinued when the adjacent Buxton Center Elementary School opened in 2010.
Attempts to save the old school didn’t materialize. The Community Heritage Alliance of Rural Maine and the historical society banded together in an effort to re-purpose the building. The alliance, a local group, thought Maine School Administrative District 6, which includes Buxton as one of its five towns, could have converted it for use as a community center.
In 2011, Buxton voters narrowly defeated a referendum that would have turned the building into a community center for the town. Under the proposal, the town had an opportunity to lease the building from the school district for $1 a year.
The school district recently used the building for its maintenance and technology departments. But, with no continued use for the building, the school district’s board of directors authorized its destruction.
In June, the town posted notices on the school’s entrances warning it was an unsafe structure.
Costs to demolish the old school ran about $160,000, according to Jacob Stoddard of Buxton, vice chairman of the SAD 6 board. “There will also be some additional cost for asbestos, and other hazardous material abatement,” Stoddard said in an email.
Dearborn Construction of Buxton razed the building Tuesday. School buses rolled in next door, delivering students to the new Buxton Center Elementary School, and drivers of some cars heading toward the new school stopped to gawk at the demolition in progress.
Workers took a brief break early Tuesday as they waited for a water truck to hose down dust that arose from the wreckage. A gaping hole punched through the rear of the old school revealed varnished woodwork and chalkboards in first- and second-floor classrooms.
Watching the scene Tuesday, Ken Oxton of Buxton said his son went to school there, and saw potential to utilize the building for a farmers market and for a variety of seminars like teaching public safety courses or classes about new energy systems that could benefit the town’s citizens.
“This could have been a community center,” Oxton said.
The school apparently was solidly built. Marguerite Gardner of Hollis, a historical society vice president, said in an email to the American Journal that she “overheard one of the Dearborn Construction workers say, ‘She’s a tough old girl. She didn’t want to go down.’”
Oxton snapped photos of the demolition. He said in the past two weeks numerous people, armed with cameras, stopped at the old school.
Gardner said among the saddest images for her were “watching the front door and face those beautiful windows being shoved in and collapsing in rubble.”
Stoddard said the gym would be leveled.
“I’m not sure what the project schedule is, but I know it’s anticipated to take several days,” Stoddard said in an email Wednesday.
But some demolition reached the gym Tuesday. Looking through what Gardner said “used to be” the gym wall, she said she saw a “basketball hoop hanging there, waiting for a ball to be thrown into it.”
In Hill’s message in the historical society’s fall newsletter, she referred to the demolition of the Hanson School as “needless waste and destruction.”
The demolition stirred emotions.
“All I could think of was the loss of that beautiful building just ripe for community use,” Gardner wrote.
Dearborn Construction workers spray water to settle dust during demolition of the Samuel D. Hanson School on Tuesday in Buxton. The 85-year old school was a landmark in a historic section of Route 22. Staff photo by Robert Lowell
The Hanson School is a pile of rubble. Photo by Beth Gardner, Cheshire Mills Photography
Send questions/comments to the editors.
