Moving Day At Birdvale, 1959

On September 10, 1954, the school boards of Mapleton Borough and Union Township signed an agreement to build one elementary school together. It took a while. The site was approved in January 1957, bids were opened that October, and construction began on December 27, 1957. The finished building cost $313,499 and was heated with oil, all controlled electronically.

Moving day was February 16, 1959. In the borough's 1966 centennial book, Miles E. Corbin, the sixth grade teacher and principal, called it a day to remember around Mapleton. The school was leaving a building used nearly ninety years for what he called a dream place, one people had talked about for 25 to 30 years without really expecting it to happen.

It was a pleasant, clear winter day. Buses went to the Sherman School in Smith Valley, the Lincoln School in Hares Valley, and the foot of the hill in town for the pupils of the school on the hill. Those children walked down in orderly procession, with townspeople along the way snapping pictures of what Corbin called the historic exodus.

About 180 pupils were enrolled. They assembled in the new all purpose room, were sent to their classrooms, bought lunch tickets, ate a cafeteria lunch and put in a full day of school with very few hitches.

The Mapleton-Union Elementary School at Birdvale was dedicated with an open house on Sunday, April 5, 1959. Kindergarten arrived on January 24, 1966: two sessions, morning and afternoon, for about 50 children, some of them bused from the lower part of the Mount Union area. By then, Corbin wrote, the average classroom held 25 to 35.

Checked 2026-10-31 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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