When Heritage Barnwood Products got the call to remove the District 18 Oak Hill Schoolhouse they knew that there would be people in the community who were upset to lose a piece of Isanti County history. After all, there are members of the community who attended what is now called the Gable schoolhouse still alive who remember the structure in better days. Heritage Barnwood Products also knew that without their efforts to reclaim parts of the schoolhouse, what was left of the structure would either be burned or buried. The cost of restoring the once-loved schoolhouse was too high.
The Oak Hill schoolhouse was a one-room schoolhouse built by the early settlers of Isanti County in 1870. Minnesota had been a state for 12 years and the total population was only 439,000 people. The school remained in continuous operation until 1950. Since then, the building has sat vacant, except for the hundreds of chickens the Gable family housed in the building. The grounds around the building were so overgrown with trees that the only part visible was a church-like spire that sat atop the building housing the bell that once called students in for classes.
The owner of the property Dan Gable and his family had a long history with the schoolhouse even before it became part of their property. “My grandfather went to school there. He was 10 when they moved to that farmstead from Iowa. He went to school there from 1911 until he graduated from Cambridge High School. And then my dad and his two brothers also went to school there.”
His personal relation to the building was less academic. When the school closed in the 1950’s it was converted to a chicken coop and remained a coop until 1974. “We had 500 chickens in there. Every two weeks like clockwork year-round, we had to go shovel the bloody thing out. Happy days.”
His family’s connection to the schoolhouse is what made the decision to take down the small building so difficult. “I want to emphasize it wasn’t like, wow, that thing is in my way. We just want to get rid of it. It wasn’t an easy decision to have it taken down, but it was in tremendous disrepair. A tree had gone down in the southwest corner. So there’s years’ worth of rainwater that went in there for many years.”
The Gable family had made inquiries to determine if anyone wanted to remove the building and restore it like other schoolhouses in the area, but no one stepped up to rescue the little white schoolhouse. Instead, it was suggested that the family cover the cost of restoration and open the schoolhouse up to tours, which the family was not prepared to do. Eventually, the building became a liability.
“There are a lot of vacant buildings in the county that people go into and strip copper out of the walls. Just see how destructive they can be. My wife and I just decided we didn’t want to risk liability. We were afraid somebody would touch it off and it would burn down half the township. It was hard to get homeowners insurance too so we just decided it was time. But we didn’t want to just see it get hauled off in a dumpster.”
That’s when they decided to contact Heritage Barnwood Products to take the building down so that the Gable Schoolhouse could be repurposed.
Dan Mulder, the Wood Shop Lead, for Heritage Barnwood Products who supervised the demo of the schoolhouse knows that the building means a lot to the Gable family and the community. His respect for the craftsmanship of the pioneers who hewed the wood by hand is evident. “The fact that they did it all by hand it’s impressive and really cool to look at.”
He also knows that the schoolhouse will now serve a new purpose. “The proceeds don’t just go to line some company’s bottom line or fill their quota for the quarter. Our proceeds go towards wages that these clients get to take home and have a full life.”
A New Life for The Old School
Saws, sanders, and screw guns buzz from every corner of the workshop at Heritage Barnwood Products, a division of Phase Industries. The neat little shop is sectioned into different areas for sanding, sawing, and assembly making production of tables, chairs, and more, organized and efficient. It wasn’t always this way.
Loran Beumer remembers when he came to Phase Industries as a bus route chaperone, the workshop didn’t even have electric sanders. “They did all hand sanding, and we had a small table saw and a radial arm saw, and that was it. They were making birdhouses, bird feeders, planter boxes, little stuff like that. I just had a bigger vision and started talking with Mike about it. Over those three or four years, we built it into this.”
‘This’ is a large workspace inside a nondescript office building in Cambridge. The walls are lined with project wood culled from barns around the area. Thanks to generous donations from the Isanti County Sportsman Club, Heritage Barnwood Products has been able to purchase equipment that has allowed them to grow from producing birdhouses to custom home décor. All of it reclaimed and built by men and women with developmental disabilities.
The staff from Heritage Barnwood Products began the removal of the Gable Schoolhouse in June and wrapped up the process at the beginning of August. Siding and boards from the schoolhouse have been transported to the workshop and are already in the process of becoming beautiful home décor.
Mulder has created a prototype for a waterfall edge tables to be created with the Gable Schoolhouse boards. The design is elegant and respectful of the wood’s history. A tangible, livable piece of furniture, that people who have a memory of the Gable Schoolhouse can take home with them.
“I wanted to come up with something that was unique to the schoolhouse that we could market and sell. We could do something like this and make a full dining table. We could do a coffee table that’s short in front of your couch or alongside your chair, sofa table, or whatever. Underneath you’ll be able to see all the 100-year-old saw marks in the original barn wood. But then up here it’s going to be finished off a lot nicer. You’re still going to see all the nail holes, but it’s more useful if you don’t have to navigate all the bumps and cuts of the rough wood, particularly if you’re going to write on it or use it (the wood) for a dining table or a coffee table where you don’t want to have your cup spilled because it’s bumpy with saws and stuff. And then we’re going to put some of the square headnails from the schoolhouse. We had so many of them and they’re all hand forged.”
Hand forged and hand pulled. Crews worked for weeks to reclaim as many of the nails as they possibly could. Not wasting any part of the buildings they remove seems to be a priority. Volunteer Amy Kirkhoff even came up with a planter concept that would make use of the smaller offcuts of wood. “We have a wood shop in the garage and I started playing with angles and trigonometry. I spent an hour, hour and a half with one a few weeks ago and all we did was work on just figuring out how to make these cuts.”
“We don’t shy away from if it’s going to be too hard,” said Mulder. “It’s actually fine if it’s hard. That gives us time to instruct and teach on a different level. It gives them different skills in the whole process. These (planters) come together a little bit harder but they use less material.”
The passion for woodworking is clear when Mulder speaks about the pieces Heritage Barnwood Products creates, but it’s even more evident when he talks about the people he works with.
“What attracted me to Phase was first off woodworking because I love it. And I grew up with a sister with Down Syndrome and I also worked with developmentally disabled for years. I love woodworking and this demographic. I am passionate about serving and helping them to have a full life. And those two things added to a really stress-free job. I’m not taking stress home with me at night. I don’t really have to debrief as you might have with some jobs and careers.”
Every part of the Gable Schoolhouse demo was an opportunity for Mulder’s crew to learn valuable skills.
“That’s the customer service side. You don’t think there’s customer service side to barn demos, but there is. That’s not our property. A few of the guys question, why do we do it this way? Particularly when we were all done on our last day there, we spent a good hour raking and running the magnet over to pick up nails and making sure all the piles were nice and tidy. And I said when you treat this job site nice, Dan’s going to tell everybody. And I said now we’re going to get more business, you know, because not only do we do a good job but we leave the site nice and clean and he doesn’t have to do any cleanup. That word-of-mouth customer service is what we want. And again, this goes back to a transferable skill to a community employment job because there’s customer service side to everything you do in some sense. And so just to instill in these guys, the importance of it’s just not about us and getting the best wood we can, and then we get out of here. We’re working for Dan and we want to do it well.”
For his part, Dan Gable couldn’t be happier. “I’ve seen the kind of work they did. They were meticulous and didn’t just leave piles of trash, like cherry-pick the good stuff and leave everything else behind. There’s a variety of reasons my wife and I are both really happy with how it all turned out. One day I stopped and they were out there with yard rakes, cleaning up trash and trying to pick up as many of the nails as possible. I mean, you’re not going to get them all obviously, but they were making a good effort. It wasn’t just piles of debris left. They did a good job of keeping a clean work site and like we’ve already said, it’s going for a good purpose. A combination of factors came together and we’re happy the way it all turned out.”