Warren Township District No. 4 School

The District No. 4 School is the last one-room schoolhouse left in once rural Warren Township, now a city largely built up with industry and post World War II residential neighborhoods. The school meets national register criterion A for representing the history of district school education in old Warren Township. The building meets criterion C as a well preserved example of later nineteenth-century one-room school buildings.

The District No. 4 School is a simple gable-front one-room school building built in 1875. The building is sided on all four sides in vertical board-and-batten wood siding. A central front entry is sheltered by a small shed-roof canopy, supported by a triangular bracket at each end and displaying a central front-facing gable finished with sunburst motif. The school is finished with square-head windows, mostly of double-hung, four-over-four type, set in simple frames- those for the two front windows (only) with low gable caps. Green-painted board shutters were added during the restoration to protect the windows. The building's front gable is crowned by a square-plan belfry with louvered pointed-arch opening in each face and a low pyramid roof (the present belfry, built in 1997, attempts to reproduce a historic one removed decades ago). A raised circle centered in the front gable, visible in old photographs, now displays the school's historic name and date of construction, 1875. The school has ground dimension of forty-seven feet in length by twenty-five in width. Sold into private ownership in 1944, the school was moved one-quarter mile to its current location in 1988 and, restored over a seven-year period, now serves as a museum.