GARCIA — Time has barely ticked forward in a 150-year-old schoolhouse near Colorado’s southern edge, where hundreds of dusty books line wooden shelves, worn desks lie entangled in a clumsy pile and a few faded white numbers and letters linger on the dark green chalkboard.
Stepping inside is almost like walking into a time capsule — one that a local school district is ready to reopen to restore and return the building to its original use: educating kids who live in a remote pocket of Colorado, many from low-income families.
“You think about everything that we’re trying to do with education now and then you look in here and you think about everything they were doing with what they had then,” said Toby Melster, superintendent of Centennial School District R-1, while visiting the schoolhouse in February. “The ones that did teach the kids here were probably saying the same thing (as us): ‘If I only had, if I only had.’”
The San Luis district of nearly 190 students in preschool through 12th grade is part of a project to both preserve and modernize the Garcia Grade School — which could date back as far as the 1860s, experts say — so that students can once again begin learning in the same rooms as generations of kids did before them. Melster imagines creating a learning center with computer stations where students can tackle assignments and members of the public can sit down to conduct research and a meeting space where teachers can walk kids through lessons in a spot rife with history.
The building, owned by Centennial School District, has largely sat vacant for about three decades. As it shows its age with cracks in the walls and water damage, the team behind its renovation is sprinting against time to revive it.
The school is one in a string of historical structures dotting the San Luis Valley that Colorado Preservation Inc. has added to its list of Most Endangered Places, which tracks old buildings that are neglected or close to crumbling and that communities are rallying to save. With the right care and attention, those buildings can have a second chance at flourishing while continuing to give their communities a portal to the past.
Others that have made the Most Endangered Places list in the area include nine mission churches, one of which is on the verge of collapse, that have long been the religious and cultural center of their communities throughout the San Luis Valley. Barbara Darden, principal of Parker-based firm Scheuber + Darden Architects, nominated those churches to the list and is also helping revitalize the Garcia Grade School while juggling a variety of other historical preservation projects.
Among them is the People’s Market in San Luis, a former family-owned grocery store dating to the 1860s, which is in the process of becoming a co-op where community members can shop for fresh food and learn about traditional foods in a community kitchen, Darden said.
Another project on her radar is a former bank, which is about 100 years old and now partially collapsed. The downtown building has deteriorated significantly over the past year and a half, Darden said, and she’s racing to help transform it into affordable housing, a restaurant and a youth recreation center.
“The buildings aren’t what’s important,” Darden said. “It’s the people and the culture, and the buildings tell that story, help interpret that story of a town or a community.”
Weaving together the old and the new
Garcia, which is about 18 miles southwest of San Luis, was a Hispanic settlement established before Colorado was designated a state in 1876, according to Julie Chacon, executive director of the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area.
Enticed by land offerings for settlement, Hispanic settlers flocked to the area at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 when the region belonged to the New Mexico Territory, according to a historical structure assessment of the Garcia Grade School. Garcia, originally named Plaza de los Manzanares, was established in 1849.
The community today has few buildings — the school is one of the last remaining — and likely fewer than 50 people who call it home. Traces of the original settlement are still visible, with a plaza, or square, that anchored Garcia right in front of the school designed to protect residents from outsiders, including Native Americans and white people.
The school shuttered in 1963 after a wave of lone-standing schools across Colorado consolidated, prompting closures of rural schools in the late 1940s and 1950s, the historical structure assessment notes. Kids were then bused to Centennial Union School in San Luis, and the schoolhouse pivoted to a library and housed a Head Start Program until 1995.
It has since been dormant.
Chacon encouraged the school district during the pandemic to push for the old school to become designated as one of Colorado’s most endangered places and restore it so that students lacking internet access in Costilla County — one of the poorest in the state — would have a reliable spot to study.
Centennial School District plans to install a cellphone tower near the school property using state grant funds, which will open up internet access to families throughout the valley, Melster said.
Darden is optimistic about the condition of the Garcia Grade School. At first glance, the building appears dilapidated with an adobe exterior covered in cracks, a door frame where paint has withered away and part of a ceiling that is starting to cave.
But look deeper and striking details reflecting the building’s history emerge: three layers of flooring, the lowest of which has bark on the back of it, which means it was made locally from a tree that was cut down and sliced; original mud plaster that is still intact; a lava stone foundation, common in many of the region’s buildings; and a pop of bright blue paint behind some trim, which is indicative of early hand-mixed paints, according to Darden.
Other elements of the building and remnants stashed inside reveal how the school and learning materials its teachers and students used evolved over time. The metal roof was installed sometime after 1995. Stucco was added to the walls at some point in hopes of protecting the adobe from water. Meanwhile, a set of encyclopedias rests atop a shelf in front of a window while a rack of magazines, including Time and National Geographic dating to the 1980s and 1990s, sits in another room.
Breathing new life into the schoolhouse will demand a delicate balance between accentuating its original materials and updating it to meet the needs of current students. Re-establishing the deteriorating foundation, which animals have crawled down to and dislodged, will be one of the major undertakings.
The building’s corners are leaning outward, due to water infiltrating the structure, which means project leaders will have to figure out how to protect the adobe. Near the north door, the adobe is completely gone, setting up the potential for a collapse, Darden said.
Darden and Melster also have plans to create a unisex, handicap-accessible bathroom in the school, possibly turn to solar energy to power the building and take steps to beautify the outside, maybe introducing some picnic shelters and community gardens. Grants from the History Colorado State Historical Fund and the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area are supporting construction drawings for the school renovation project and future phases of construction, Darden said.
“It’s a challenge and there’s a fine balance between the old and the new and how you incorporate that,” she said.
“This is where your roots came to you”
Micheal Medina attended the Garcia Grade School when some of the old was the new. Medina, 89, was born in Garcia and completed first through eighth grade in the 1940s along with his five brothers and one sister. Their mother also graduated from the school.
Medina, who would walk about 200 yards to school from his family’s home, clearly remembers his three teachers there — one who taught first, second and third grades; another who taught fourth, fifth and sixth grades; and a third who taught seventh and eighth grades.
“We had at least one teacher and maybe two teachers who were very instrumental in seeing that we learned how to add, how to subtract, how to multiply, how to put a sentence together, which helped very much later on in life,” Medina said.
While growing up in Garcia, the community had a few hundred residents and was small enough that everyone knew everyone, Medina said.
He has carried vivid details of his hometown and school with him through the decades. He can easily recall playing baseball behind the school building and being around his classmates on a playground with a swing set, a slide and a merry-go-round. He laughs as he drums up a memory of playing hooky with some of his peers. That was the only time he skipped school, he said, after his mother found him beyond the riverbend and escorted him back to class with a switch in her hand.
Moments from inside the classroom have also stayed with him, including the challenge of trying to learn English and being barred from speaking Spanish, his first language, while at school.
As soon as kids left school grounds, they switched back to Spanish, Medina said.
He continued his education at high school a few miles away in Costilla, New Mexico — the only high school in the area. At 18, Medina left Garcia with his family and many other locals, driven away after a compact between New Mexico and Colorado deprived Garcia residents of river water.
In recent years, Medina has lived in Brighton — after serving in the military, teaching and starting his own insurance business — but he has regularly visited Garcia to clean up the gravesites of his family members. His pilgrimages back have taken on a more somber tone as Garcia has largely hollowed out. But the prospect of his former school reopening brightens his outlook, and he has a stack of dictionaries, Civil War books and Hispanic history and geneology books he plans to donate to further students’ grasp of core subjects including reading and writing.
“Everyone should have those basics,” Medina said.
Others still living in the San Luis Valley hope the renewed schoolhouse reinforces another lesson to students — one much more personal.
“This is where your family started,” said Chacon, of the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area. “This is where your roots came to you.”