The Centre Street Grammar School

The three-story brick-and-sandstone building at 305 North Centre Street — a corner parcel that also fronts Race Street — is the third school to stand on a lot that has held a schoolhouse since 1819, and the one whose origins the surviving record documents in unusual detail. It was designed by the Philadelphia architect John Fraser, contracted in 1863, and dedicated three days before Christmas in 1865 as the borough’s Female Grammar School. It taught Pottsville’s children for more than a century, closed in 1982, and since 2002 has been the home of the Schuylkill County Historical Society — the county’s history museum and research library.

The lot before the school

The ground had been set aside for schooling almost from the town’s beginning. About 1817, John Pott — the ironmaster who founded Pottsville — dedicated the Centre Street plot as a burial place for the inhabitants and a lot for a school, a grant he never put in writing. A log schoolhouse, the borough’s first, went up on the lot around 1819 at the direction of John Pott Jr.; a stone school replaced it about 1841; and Fraser’s building replaced the stone school. A schoolhouse stood on this corner, in one form or another, from 1819 until 1982 — more than a century and a half.

Clearing the title (1862)

Building on Pott’s old lot first required untangling his unwritten gift. In 1862 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in Pott v. School Directors (42 Pa. 132), reversed a lower-court decree that had tried to stop the district from building on the old Pott lot, and dismissed the challenge — clearing the way for construction. The opinion, by Chief Justice Lowrie, is also the authority that fixes the lot’s original dedication at “about 1817.”

John Fraser’s schoolhouse

For a coal-region county seat to engage John Fraser in 1862 was an act of ambition. Fraser (1825–1906), Scottish-born and Philadelphia-based, was an established Philadelphia architect, best known for the Union League of Philadelphia (1864–65), whose brick-and-brownstone palette he carried to Pottsville the year before. In 1867 he took Frank Furness into partnership as Fraser, Furness & Hewitt — the lineage from which Furness’s celebrated Philadelphia practice descended. The Pottsville school is one of the few Fraser buildings outside the Philadelphia–Washington axis; the architectural historian George E. Thomas, writing for the Society of Architectural Historians, calls it the “corbeled former Female Grammar School” anchoring “the commercial heart of Pottsville.”

The directors advertised for proposals in the fall of 1862 and signed a contract on April 13, 1863 with three Pottsville builders — Henry Zimmerman, Jonathan Schum, and Samuel Auman — for $21,868.52. The Miners’ Journal of December 3, 1864, describing the near-finished building, fixes its form: a ground plan 76 feet 6 inches along Centre Street by 60 feet deep, three stories of brick over a Trenton-sandstone first story, corbeled brickwork at the cornice, and a cupola. Inside were eight schoolrooms for fifty pupils each, a first-floor lecture-and-examination room, a public-library room, and a directors’ room, warmed by furnaces in the cellar and modeled on one of Fraser’s own Philadelphia schools.

”One of the best school houses in the State”

The building was finished and in use by late 1865 and formally dedicated on the evening of Friday, December 22, 1865. The audience was small — a cold night, dangerous walking, and the approach of the holidays — but the Miners’ Journal called the school “one of the best school houses in the State,” and the speakers, State Superintendent Charles R. Coburn and Prof. J. P. Wickersham, “pronounced the building and furniture the most complete they have seen.” The Civil War had driven up costs: a $9,500 wartime allowance for the rising price of labor and materials brought the total to about $31,368, and even then the contractors reported a loss.

The Female Grammar School

In the common-school era a “grammar school” was the upper-elementary grade between the primary grades and the high school, and Pottsville — like most Pennsylvania boroughs of the day — separated the sexes at that level. The 1863 building was the borough’s girls’ grammar-grade school, and it doubled from the first as civic space: the county Teachers’ Association met in the new Female Grammar School building in 1866. The same war that inflated its cost also thinned the district’s upper grades — Munsell’s 1881 county history recalled that “when work was plenty and wages high, many of the larger pupils left the school” for the mines — so that for most Pottsville children a grammar school was the practical ceiling of a formal education.

In 1895 the district cleared the last of John Pott’s old burial ground behind the school and leveled it for a playground. The building otherwise served continuously as a school for well over a century.

Closing, and a second life

The Centre Street School closed on January 4, 1982, when Pottsville consolidated its scattered elementaries into the new John S. Clarke Elementary Center; the Pottsville Republican, marking the moment, called it “the oldest of the group of Pottsville Schools which closed.” The building stood vacant for years. Its rescue came from the Historical Society of Schuylkill County, incorporated in 1903 and then housed on North Third Street: with the Albany preservation architects John G. Waite Associates and the Cressona builder Miller Bros. Construction, it restored the derelict school — down to replicating cornice pieces reportedly removed in the 1950s from a surviving mold — and won a 2002 Pennsylvania Historic Preservation Award. The Society moved in that same year.

The Historical Society today

The building now holds the Society’s local-history museum, its genealogical research library, and a collection of more than 20,000 historical photographs, with a Civil War Room as a centerpiece. It stands within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. A recent, grant-aided project has begun replacing the building’s fifty-five windows with faithful copies of Fraser’s originals. Current visiting hours and contact details are on the Society’s directory listing.