Four-and-a-half decades after the last of its students shut their books for the summer and Watson School closed its doors on 111 years of continuous operation, restoration is under way in hopes the one-room west Sonoma County schoolhouse can once again play host to the public.
An extremely dry winter has aided construction efforts begun in mid-November to replace the school's wood foundation with a concrete one, shore up walls for structural and seismic integrity, and otherwise ensure the building is safe to occupy, county Senior Parks Planner Mark Cleveland said.
Crews also are improving access for the disabled to visit the school and the small, surrounding park built when the county parks department took it over.
"That's the only good thing about not having any rain is we've been able to get a lot of this stuff done," Cleveland said.
But park officials mainly credit the project to a windfall of sorts in the form of a $200,000 bequest from a onetime Watson School student who died early last year.
Daniel B. Furlong, a third-generation Watson School student, was one of two eighth-graders who graduated in the class of 1967, the last year the school was open.
He was always proud of having come from a one-room school eventually to earn a civil engineering degree from UC Davis, his brother, Mike Furlong, said.
Built in 1856 to educate the children of Freestone, Valley Ford and Bodega, the tiny white building off Bodega Highway served students - usually 10 or so at a time - until it was closed down and turned over to the Sonoma County Regional Parks Department in 1967.
It was believed to have been the longest operating one-room public schoolhouse in California history and has had minimal alteration over the years, park experts say.
Dan Furlong was one of six siblings whose father, Ed Furlong, a local sheep rancher, and grandmother, May Furlong, also attended the school, Mike Furlong said. Sometimes three or four Furlong kids were enrolled at the same time, he said.
Dan Furlong later went onto Santa Rosa Junior College and then UC Davis, but remained forever proud of "where it all started," his brother said.
Furlong worked as a civil engineer for three decades before succumbing to cancer at age 56 on Feb. 13. Never married, one of his last wishes was to contribute to the restoration of his first school, Mike Furlong said.
Park officials created a roadside park around the schoolhouse soon after taking it over, naming it Wayside Park and, later, Running Fence Park in recognition of its use for part of a 24.5-mile fabric fence created by Bulgarian artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude from 1972 to 1976.
But two efforts to fix its rotting foundation proved only temporary, and the picturesque school was closed to the public due to unsafe conditions in the 1990s.
The school, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, still has its original slate chalkboard, teacher's podium and window frames and sashes, though mesh glass windows were installed after vandals destroyed older glass panes, Cleveland said.
But efforts to find funding for needed restoration were unsuccessful until Furlong's gift was received.
Park officials expect to need additional donations to pay for new windows and interior renovations, and hope eventually to restore or replace interior amenities with historically accurate fixtures in hopes of using the landmark school for class field trips and interpretive programs.
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