Gardner School / Oakgrove School
Cooper Township
Location: District #8, fractional – Section 35, east side of Riverview Drive between G Avenue and Mt. Olivet Drive.
Kalamazoo County 1890, Published by Wm. C. Sauer. Local History Room
Oakgrove School, c1900. Kalamazoo Valley Museum Photograph, 61.373.F
Gardner School was once known as Oakgrove School. Three photographs from the Kalamazoo Valley Museum collection, including the one above, were identified that way by the donor, and dated about 1900-1905. It does, however, match a photograph of School #8 (Gardner) that appears in If Only the Walls Could Talk. It appeared as Gardner School on the 1918 topographic map. It was not listed under Cooper Township in the Kalamazoo County school directories from 1925 on (we have none before that time), but may have been absorbed into the Parchment School system. Later it was used as a house and was still standing, at least as late as 2000.
Compiled by Catherine Larson, Local History Specialist, Kalamazoo Public Library, 1999. Mapped October 2008. Last updated 21 October 2021.
Sources
Manuscripts
List of one-room schools still standing in Kalamazoo County in 1982
- Hultmark, Sarah.
- Manuscript, Local History Collection, Kalamazoo Public Library
Books
If only the walls could talk: the architectural heritage of Cooper, Michigan
- Christlieb, W. Ward
- Allegan Forest, Michigan: The Priscilla Press, 2000
- H 977.417 C555, page 158
Maps and atlases
USGS topographic map for Kalamazoo County, 1918 (Kalamazoo Quadrangle)
- History Room topographic map case, drawer 7A, folder 21A