About Cornell School

Note: Cornell School is closed from November 1 to March 30.
Note: Fees for Classroom visits and/or tours to Cornell School are listed at our Contact link.

A Brief History of Cornell School

Cornell School originally was located in St. Albans Township, near Alexandria, Ohio and served the surrounding farm families until 1923 when Ohio started consolidating their school districts. The dilapidating structure was then mainly used as a farm storage building and sat close to Duncan Plains Road in front of Tom and Gloria Miller’s modern-day built home. The Miller family offered to donate the one-room school to the Friends group with the condition that it be moved off their property.

A group of interested local educators, historians and friends were excited about saving this educational treasure and thus, the Friends of Cornell School organized in 1987 and began planning how to proceed.

In 1990 the Friends of Cornell School received permission from the Johnstown-Monroe School District Board of Education to allow the one-room schoolhouse to be moved to their campus. It was at that time that the Friends ramped up fundraising so the deteriorating structure could be relocated onto the local school district property. In May 1991 the one-room schoolhouse traveled slowly down State Route 37 to its new home that was four miles away. It has resided at 453 S. Main Street for the last 32 years.

In 1996, after a painstaking 5 years of restoration and dealing with damaging weather related issues, the Friends of Cornell School group was finally able to start providing their “living history program” called “A Day in the Life of Cornell School”. This well-researched, historical reenactment experience continues to this day to provide participants a “travel back in time” for an authentic 1880-1900’s rural one-room schoolhouse visit.

The vintage schoolhouse is considered valuable as an American architectural icon due to it being one of the few surviving single room brick school houses in central Ohio. Along with that fact, the Friends of Cornell School group has continued its vision to provide local history lessons and other educational programming to the children of the Johnstown-Monroe School District, the Johnstown community, and other central Ohio participants.

They also value their membership in the Country School Association of America (CSAA) and their addition in May 2024 to the National Schoolhouse Registry Currently, Cornell School is the only one-room school listed on this registry.