MUSCATINE Almost 50 years after a one-room schoolhouse in West Liberty closed its doors, it will get a turn-of-the century wooden floor, returning the structure to how it looked when one teacher taught students of all ages under one roof.

The schoolhouse once stood on a particularly swampy swath of land outside West Liberty, earning it the nickname the Swamp School." But since its construction at around 1879, the building was moved a couple of times and was used as a garage at some point. By the time it moved to West Liberty Heritage Park in 2004, the school lost its original wooden floor. Instead, the building had an industrial-looking poured concrete floor that seems at odds with the wooden features of the schoolhouse.

When you look at the old one-room schoolhouse and you see a modern poured concrete floor, thats not really how it was, said Scott Brooke of the West Liberty Heritage Foundation, the organization that now owns the house. We want to try and give a presentation that would give an accurate image of what a one-room school house looked like back in the day. And by putting down a vintage wooden floor it would give you a better idea of how things looked.

The floor will be the last big project in a long list of restoration projects that the West Liberty Heritage Foundation has undertaken to bring the schoolhouse back to its former glory. The $6000 project is funded in part by individual donations. The West Liberty Heritage Foundation was also awarded an almost $3,000 grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa this month for the project.

A relic of rural history, the Swamp School is one of a handful of one-room schoolhouses to be preserved in Muscatine County. At one point, according to the Iowa State Historical Society, almost 14,000 such schools dotted rural Iowa. Most were closed in the 1960s after the Iowa State Legislature mandated the creation of school districts.

It was one of the few ones that actually remained standing and all the other ones have kind of either fallen in or burned down or torn down or fallen to a state of disrepair, Brooke said.

Brooke said the foundation is looking for a turn-of-the century floor to maintain the houses historical accuracy. The floor will most likely come from an old barn or another structure built around that time. Restoration, he said, will begin in the fall and will take about a week to 10 days.

Its just an important part of our history, as an in-town school would be. Its building our community, he said.

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West Liberty one-room schoolhouse to receive new floors - Quad City Times