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- Beaver Island History Map, 1978 revision
Summary
Sunnyside School was a rural Beaver Island schoolhouse on the King’s Highway and also served as a Peaine Township meeting and election place. A later first-person account remembers eight grades taught in one room while the second room hosted quilting bees and elections.
The 1978 History Map dates the school 1901–1948 and says the building became a home in 1963. The source record does not support those dates as written. Helen Collar’s notes preserve a memory of a log Sunnyside schoolhouse associated with a child who arrived in 1884, which may describe an earlier building rather than the map’s structure. More decisively, a contemporary December 1965 Beaver Beacon notice says Frank and Gladys Schnaudigel had just moved into the remodeled old school after a summer’s work. The residential conversion is therefore documented in 1965, not 1963.
Evidence limits
No deed, school-district minute book, building record, or closure order was found to establish when the surviving building was erected or when classes ended. The pre-1901 log-school memory may concern a predecessor on or near the same site. No coordinate is inferred from the illustrated map.
Sources
- Records an informant's memory that Sunnyside was a log schoolhouse when Mary Early, who arrived as a four-year-old in 1884, attended; elsewhere calls Sunnyside “the one near the church.” The recollection does not date construction of the surviving building.web · collar_subject_cards_e-i
- Beaver Beacon, November 2003, school-day memoir.Recalls Sunnyside as a two-room building with one classroom for eight grades and another room used for quilting bees and elections, also serving as Peaine Town Hall. This is retrospective first-person evidence. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.data1 · beaver-island-archive · beaver_beacon · 2003-11_Beaver-Beacon
- Contemporary notice says Frank and Gladys Schnaudigel moved into the remodeled old Sunnyside School after working on it all summer. This contradicts the History Map's “a home since 1963” date.data1 · beaver-island-archive · beaver_beacon · 1965-12_Beaver-Beacon
- Described in this archive: Beaver Island History Map, 1978 revision.Gives 1901–1948 for the school and says it had been a home since 1963. The broader school identity is corroborated, but the inspected sources place a Sunnyside school tradition before 1901 and the residential move in 1965.
Added 7 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “Sunnyside School”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/structures/sunnyside-school/, accessed [date], citing Helen Collar Papers, Beaver Island history subject cards, E-I, “Beaver Island schools,” Clarke Historical Library, retrieved 2026. (and 3 further sources listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-07. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.