Riverside Elementary fourth graders Jack Burkowitz, left, and Matthew Sloan enjoy a picnic dinner using rubber tires as chairs at the school¹s playground dedication on Oct. 24, 1998. Heinz Pet Products donated 5,000 in new playground equipment to the school.

The oldest school in the Lawrence school district is about to be history.

Riverside School, the third descendant of a one-room schoolhouse born north of town in February 1855, is closing at the end of the academic year, the latest victim of the district’s ever-shrinking budget.

But the school’s leaders, students and alumni promise that Riverside’s spirit — grown from rural roots, nurtured through close relationships and nourished by Karen Crowe’s pumpkin pancakes — will live on forever.

“You can’t forget,” said Sherry Tamerius, who’s taught at 601 N. Iowa for the past 15 years. “It’s kind of like your first love: You always remember your first love. The people who have gone though this school will always remember the closeness we’ve all shared.”

Rural roots

Riverside couldn’t be anything but close-knit, given its origins.

As Lawrence was founded along the Kansas River in 1854, a handful of area settlers busily were organizing a school. Owners of timber-laden property donated two logs each, while owners of prairie land kicked in for a door and two windows needed to finish off the first building, measuring 16-by-18 feet.

An early Riverside School class poses for an all-school group shot in front of one of the earlier Riverside buildings. The brick schoolhouse in the background was constructed in 1903 to replace an 1866 stone building. Both stood on the same plot of land as the modern-day Riverside, which will close for good on Friday.

Allen Gentry served as the school’s first teacher. Students and their families paid tuition of $1 a month, payable directly to Gentry during the three-month term.

The school, then serving the Riverside school district, gave way in 1866 to a new, stone building on a new site: an acre a half-mile north of what is today Hallmark Cards Inc.

The rural site remains home to Riverside’s current operations, built upon a foundation of community support and historical evolution:

l The stone building’s replacement, a larger structure framed in red brick, was among the area’s first rural schools to include a furnace. The building would serve as a community gathering place, including a venue for weekly debates and Sunday school classes. Area residents hired a minister to conduct church services there once a month.

l After lightning struck the school’s bell tower in 1950 — setting the interior ablaze, blowing out electric motors for the school’s well and knocking out the oil furnace — Riverside patrons rebuilt the school’s belfry, rewired the building and hung new nylon curtains. The school’s 22 students once again could sit in wooden desks facing their teacher, under the watchful eyes of a portrait of George Washington.

l In 1998, Heinz Pet Products, next door, donated money to upgrade the school’s playground.

“We’ve always had a community feeling,” said Linda Rogers, who will end this year as the school’s last principal.

This old Studebaker wagon doubled as a Riverside School bus in the 1950s and '60s. Riverside alumni Mark Bernard remembers piling into the so-called

Lasting memories

That feeling was confirmed in November, when Rogers broke her leg during a school mixer. Having come to Riverside only a few months earlier from a long tenure at Wakarusa Valley School, Rogers wasn’t sure what to expect when she returned to work after eight days away.

Before she even could walk back in the door — on crutches — she had students, faculty and staff stepping out of their way to help: opening doors, pushing her wheelchair down the halls, offering words of encouragement, right down to the more than 100 get-well cards drawn up in class.

“I have them all at home,” she said, beaming. “I’ll keep them forever.”

Mark Bernard won’t soon forget his time at Riverside. He was the youngest of four brothers to go through the school in the 1950s and ’60s.

From playing defensive end for the Riverside Colts to his brothers piling into the school’s “so-called bus — an old Studebaker wagon” driven by Owen Mitchell — Bernard said he learned a lot more than the three Rs at Riverside, a half-mile away from home.

Bernard used to ride his bike to school, and even stepped up to a 50-cc Honda minibike by sixth grade. But Principal Gary Freeman wouldn’t let him park the vehicle at school, forcing the youngster to leave it at Dale Thompson’s house across the street.

An unknown person drove a car through the east wall of a Riverside School classroom in February 2000. School district crews work to rebuild the exterior wall in this photo.

“It wasn’t street legal,” said Bernard, now a 45-year-old carpenter. “It was probably the first law I ever broke. I remember that stuff like it was yesterday.”

As the Bernards grew up at Riverside, so, too, did one of the city’s biggest industrial areas. Kmart Distribution Center is just around the corner. Del Monte Foods — formerly Heinz Pet Products — makes Kibbles ‘N Bits dog food a couple hundred feet away, and Graham Trucking parks its rigs just outside the school’s playground.

Industrial influx

Not that some of the city’s biggest businesses and the district’s smallest school can’t coexist.

“They always throw the balls back over the fence,” Tamerius said.

Virginia Grob, who sent seven children to Riverside, likes to think back on the school’s early days, or at least as far back as when her son Allen Grob enrolled as a first-grader in 1964. It would lead to years of attending 4-H meetings and baking lasagna and chocolate cakes for potluck dinners.

With today’s influx of industrial operations — and dangerous traffic, including the two cars that have crashed into the school building in recent years — Grob smiles when recalling simpler times.

Susan Todd, East Heights principal in 1954-56, receives roses and a hug from sixth-grader Christine Marvin in this Oct. 22, 1976, photo. Todd and former East Heights principal Cecilia Pearson, who served from 1956 to 1968, were recognized in a ceremony at the school and with the dedication of trees planted in their honor.

Things like Florence Springer’s homemade cinnamon rolls and chicken-and-noodles in the cafeteria, a room that doubled as an auditorium and gymnasium. And Springer’s husband, Gus, keeping students in line while serving as school custodian.

And relaxing, knowing that the learning environment thrived in a quiet setting.

“It was like a little country school,” Grob said. “There was nothing around to distract the students’ attention — no big trucks, nothing. They could play in the school yard and not have to worry about anything.”

Next year, the development worries will be gone. The school’s students will be transferred to Deerfield and Pinckney schools.