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Velma has lived in Englewood for 60 years and was herself a teacher for over 30 years.
”I was a teacher for many years. My first year of teaching was in Crannell way up in the hinterlands,” she says. “For over 20 years, I was at Agnes Johnson, then three years at Redway, and then back to Agnes Johnson for nine years. When I retired, this is what they decided that I’d like to do.”
The old school building had fallen into disrepair, Velma says, and was located at the far end of the Englewood meadow, and her husband and brother-in-law decided to move it onto the Titus property and restore it for Velma. Robert and Richard Titus moved the old building piece by piece and put it back together. There were no nails used in the original 1860 construction and they had to mark each piece so it could be reassembled with all the proper mitered corners fitting perfectly into place.
Velma says that for the first ten years of its existence, the building was used as an apple barn. Apples used to be brought up the river and stored in the barn. A couple from England sailed up on the apple boat and walked over the mountain from the river and when they saw the valley below it reminded them of England and so they named it Englewood, Velma says.
”We tried to get a post office for Englewood,” Velma says, “but there’s one down south, spelled with an I. We couldn’t convince them to give us a post office. They used to bring apples up here from Ferndale by boat. We didn’t want to change the name. We kept that. We wouldn’t change it. So we didn’t get a post office. Redcrest won out as far as the post office goes.”
Englewood was the meadow where the L.K. Wood party camped to recover from the bear attack they experienced on Bear Butte. Wood and his party were looking for an alternate route to the gold mines and in doing that, they discovered Humboldt Bay and what would become Humboldt County.
The apple barn became a school in 1870, and was the only school in the area.
After they relocated the building, Velma, Robert, and Richard set about restoring the school, furnishing it with some of the original desks. Velma has added a collection of old school books, the oldest of which dates back to 1845, she says.
They also added the “Necessary,” which is the euphemism for the school outhouse. This was a later addition. Velma says that from what she was able to learn, when the school started in 1870, the “Necessary” consisted of a trench with a board over it.
A “modern” Victorian toilet was added on one side of the Necessary and one side left as it was, but glassed off so it can’t be used.
A belfry was added after the 1955 flood. Velma says the Army Corps of Engineers asked her husband and brother to clean up the old Holmes Flat school, which had been destroyed by the flood waters. They rescued eight old school desks from that school and added them to the restored Englewood School building.
”We really didn’t know what to do with the bell,” she says. “It didn’t belong to us, so we asked everybody and didn’t hear back so we built the belfry and added the bell.”
Now Velma hosts tours of students from schools and home school groups from all over the area. She maintains a guest book for her visitors and pins their thank you notes to a bulletin board in an old building converted to an office and garden storage shed. When they come in, she has them say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing “Good morning to you,” just as students might have done in the 1870s.
Velma says the school ran into some declining enrollment problems in its history and the teacher at the time took an unusual approach to solving the enrollment problem.
”Mr. George saw his school was going to go down, bless his heart, and he wrote to Mary George and said you’ve got three children and I’ve only got four students, so I’ll marry you and we will have a class.”
It worked, apparently, for after a few years the school’s enrollment swelled to about a dozen students.
Some of the mementos that have been added to the Englewood School include the diploma of Hettie Essig.
”Her brothers became entomologists,” Velma says. “Hettie graduated from the school on June 30, 1904 and married a fellow by the name of Harry Thompson in Holmes Flat. She had eight children and one of the youngest was named Flora and she married Evans. She’s the only one I know personally that graduated from here and she brought me the original copy of Hettie’s diploma.”
REDWOOD TIMES PHOTOS BY MARY ANDERSON
1. Built in 1860, the Englewood School was used as an apple barn for ten years and then became a school in 1870. When it was still a school, there was a lean-to added to the back of the building where the horses the children rode to school were tied up.
2. The building was constructed without the use of nails or spikes, held together by mitered joints. When it was moved, it had to be taken apart piece by piece, with each piece marked so that all the corners would fit when it was put back together.
3. Velma Childs pulls open the original door of the old school house. The door had an unusual lock, consisting of a metal bar that slid into a hole in the floor to prevent the door being opened from the outside. The desks are all restored desks from the Englewood and Holmes Flat schoolhouses.
4. After the 1955 flood, Robert and Richard Titus built this belfry to house the old school bell from the Holmes Flat School, which was destroyed in the flood. The bell still sounds loud and clear to call children to school.
