An Archaeology of Community Investment: The Old Edgebrook Schoolhouse in Chicago, Illinois

Summary

Many contemporary communities use refurbished schools to house historical societies and museums, and they are valued as part of local history. One-room schoolhouses also may be used to explore community investment and identity in the past; as such schools were built using locally donated land, labor, funds, and materials. Community members made deliberate choices in how to design and furnish their school. Such choices were investigated at the Old Edgebrook Schoolhouse in northwest Chicago, and the material remains of the school were compared with guides distributed by the State of Illinois setting standards for ‘ideal’ one-room schools. This comparison illuminated the types of decisions a community faced when investing in a school, and revealed how a community came together in the past to invest cooperatively in education and to display collective values and identity. This analytical strategy offers a different way to understand and interpret these structures and connect communities past and present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• Economic Archaeology

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-78,02