RIVER VALE—Long before anyone talked about recycling or sustainability, the people of River Vale simply refused to waste a good building. What today might be described as adaptive reuse was in the 19th century simply a matter of thrift.
This is the story of River Vale’s old Washington Township District 20 schoolhouse, which shed its blackboards and desks to find new life first as a carriage house and later as the town’s firehouse.
Now some might be thinking, “What does Washington Township have to do with it? I thought this was a River Vale story!”
At the time when this old schoolhouse was in use, the entire Pascack Valley was Washington Township. The massive township was divided into school districts, each with its own one-room schoolhouse where all grades were taught by a single teacher. The District 20 school was built in 1857 at the northwest corner of Piermont Avenue and Rivervale Road (now the Edgewood Country Club property).
The children of the local farmers would complete their morning chores and then journey to school each day, walking along the narrow dirt lanes or occasionally transported by horse-drawn wagon. Older children helped the younger ones as they received a basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography.
Schooling ended by the eighth grade or earlier, which served them just fine—most of the pupils would become farmers or learn a trade such as blacksmithing or carpentry.
A far cry from today’s schools that are filled with technology, the one-room schoolhouse had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Water came from a nearby well, and the bathroom was an outhouse. The only light, besides that which poured through the large windows, was from kerosene lamps. A chimney visible at the rear of the building tells us something about the heat source—probably a cast iron stove that burned wood or coal.
When a new school was built in 1895, Abram C. Holdrum moved the old one to his farm (presently 350 Rivervale Road) for use as a carriage house.
In addition to being the largest landowner in town at the turn of the 20th century, Holdrum was a freeholder and state assemblyman. He introduced the legislation that led to the incorporation of River Vale as a township.
The Holdrum Middle School bears the family name—although it honors not Abram, but his son, Garret, who was a longtime president of the board of education.
The schoolhouse was repurposed yet again when the newly formed River Vale Volunteer Fire Department took up residence there in 1923.
The building housed the department’s first motorized apparatus: a second-hand American LaFrance combination hose and chemical truck.
The firefighters occupied the building on the Holdrum estate for only a handful of years.
A new River Vale municipal building was completed in summer 1927 and it included space for the growing fire department.
With that, the old schoolhouse was once again a farm outbuilding. It was taken down around 1940.
Kristin Beuscher is president of the Pascack Historical Society.