Wayside School opens to the public

KEWAUNEE – Dr. William Faller, owner of the Heritage Farm and member of Agricultural Heritage and Resources Inc. until his passing in 2024, always dreamt of having a one-room schoolhouse on the property. It wasn’t until 2013 that the project would officially begin, with the proper permits secured to move Wayside School to his farm. However, it would still be more than a decade before the school was ready to be viewed by the public.

Wayside was built sometime in the late 1860s, with the first school board meeting held on Sept. 21, 1868. The school was rebuilt in 1878 and continued to operate until 1968, a century after it was first built. Over the course of its lifetime, it saw its first female teacher, the introduction of electric lighting, a radio and electric oil heating.

When the schoolhouse was moved in 2013, everyone held their breath. Moving a historical building meant risking cracks in the beams and other structural damage, but the school made it to Heritage Farm without any damage. Sevcik said this was in large part due to the work of the movers, DeVooght House Lifters.

The moving process required permission from the county and the state in order to travel on a state highway, a building permit for the farm, four hours of traffic control with two officers and permits from WPS, because they had to lift all of the lines as they went underneath them. Susan Sevcik, a volunteer with Heritage Farms, said WPS donated much of the fees back to the organization in order to support the project.

Dr. Faller worked on the school with high expectations, taking his time to restore it as accurately as possible.

“He was very meticulous and quite slow at things. It had to be just perfect every time,” Sevcik said, “From 2013 till probably five or 10 years later, we replaced the roof, they did some siding, they did the foundation, they put the chimney up. We put the bell tower back up, and all of those things happened about one per year.”

After Dr. Faller passed, the Rotary Club decided they wanted to honor him with a plaque recognizing the work he did not only on the schoolhouse, but for preserving Kewaunee County’s agricultural heritage at large.

“Then Doc passed away, and that’s when we started going in earnest. The rotary club contacted me because they wanted to put up a plaque for him and they needed a date. So I said, Okay, September 13. So we’ve been working really hard since then,” she said.

Sevcik said she hopes to plan a Wayside School reunion for former students, including some retired educators, as well.

As a retired educator, Sevcik envisions the schoolhouse being used as an educational opportunity for today’s schoolchildren.

“My dream is to have students come in and, depending on the size of the group, we could start them in our blacksmith shop, where they see how things were made, how blacksmithing was done,” she said, “Then move on to the town hall, with voting booths in there. There’s a lot of old information in there that we can talk to them about, not just voting, but they would have all their meetings and everything like that. And then on to the schoolhouse, where they would actually have a chance to sit in the desks and find out what it was like in school.”

The schoolhouse was full of artifacts from its time in use, including old desks and other equipment, which Dr. Faller and other community members have held on to as the school was restored. The furniture will be brought back in over the course of this week to accurately populate the building.

On Saturday, Sept. 13, the open house and dedication ceremony will begin at 10 a.m. with a speech from a member of the Rotary Club, which helped make the transfer and restoration of Wayside School possible. The schoolhouse, log cabin and blacksmith shop will all be open to the public.

“All of our equipment that we have for that we’re preserving was built in Kewaunee County. So everything here is unique to the area,” she said.

Thanks to support and donations from the community, Wayside School has been restored to its original condition as much as possible and will soon be a resource open to the public, whether locals want to see a piece of history or teachers are seeking an educational field trip experience.