Historic Crouch School is On The Move

The one-room historic Crouch School will move to a new home at Liberty Middle School, where it will become a lesson for students in living history.

“What is really happening is that we in effect are passing on to the next generation our culture and heritage,” said Pat Layden, a historic preservationist and member of the Save Crouch School Committee.

The schoolhouse at the corner of Union Mill and Compton Road in Clifton is set to move on August 11.

The Crouch family donated the land to the state in 1874 and it was used as a school until the 1920s. When individual counties began to oversee schooling, the Crouch family bought back the building from the county for $125, Layden said. Since then, the property has largely been unused.

The committee’s efforts to restore the schoolhouse began in 2006. About $100,000 later, the group has raised enough funds to move the schoolhouse to its new location in the first phase of the project.

No Fairfax County Public School funds were used in the restoration, but the district donated land on the grounds of Liberty Middle for the relocation of the old schoolhouse.

“Part of the reason we wanted to move it to Liberty was because we wanted a site as close to the original site as possible,” said Peter Noonan, assistant superintendent for instructional services for Fairfax County schools. Liberty Middle is just blocks away from the school’s original site.

The second phase of the project is the school’s interior restorations, which includes outfitting the school with period furniture so students get the real sense of what it was like in the late 1800s. The house will also have modern amenities including electricity, heating, and air conditioning.

The plan is to have teachers be able to use the schoolhouse by the middle of the 2011 school year.

“We are talking with some of the principals in the coming year to see how it will be used best,” Noonan said. “We would see kids coming from all over the county and maybe have a history class there. This is a piece of history that was saved.”