November 2024
For rural communities, one-room or small multi-room schoolhouses were the standard before communities grew and educational course offerings necessitated bigger schools, holding anywhere from several hundred to one or two thousand students. Before the invention of the automobile, these one-room or small schools were built close to the towns and farms where the students came from, as traveling by foot or horse was time consuming.
Townships were divided into School Sections, a square or rectangular size of three to five miles each. Children who lived within that area or Section would attend that school, with their parents tax dollars going towards supporting it.
S.S. No. 12 schoolhouse was a small brick schoolhouse, opened in 1899, along Concession Line 7 road, the present-day Ferndale Drive, south of Dunlop Street West. The first teacher posted to the school was L.A. Marlin.
As towns urban areas grew and transportation options improved, students were shifted out of the small rural schools and into larger schools in towns and cities. The area where S.S. No 12 is located as annexed by the Town (now city) of Barrie on 1 January 1959, leading to the eventual closure of the small, rural school.
S.S. #12 closed in 1963 and the students were transferred to Prince of Wales School, around a mile to the east, near downtown Barrie. The staff at the Ferndale school at the time were Shirley E. Pickles (1958-1963), Isabel (Russell) Nash (1957-1963) in the Senior Room and Thelma (Morton) Rockwell (1960-1963) in 12A
Many of the small schools that were no longer needed were demolished, but some have been re-purposed into private residences, municipal buildings like community centres or libraries, office space or museums. The former S.S. #12 is one such school that was re-purposed. It was used by the maintenance department of the Simcoe County District School Board for a period of time, then later sold to the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board.
Sources: https://www.barrietoday.com/columns/then-and-now/then-now-ss-no-12-ferndale-2800751.
