In 1888, the same year that residents voted to form the independent village of Edina, they built its first modern school in the heart of the community near the mill and general store on Fiftieth Street.
Compared with the one-room school built 30 years before, the two-story yellow brick building with its bell tower was an impressive building that reflected Edina’s new status. In addition to two classrooms on the main level, the basement housed a kitchen that allowed the school to serve hot food (like cocoa and huge kettles of vegetable soup) to supplement sack lunches brought from home. Two more rooms, one for boys and one for girls, served as make-shift gyms for indoor recess during bad weather.
Despite those modern amenities, the playground was simply neighboring Henry Brown’s pasture, where children played at recess and competed in inter-school baseball games that pitted them against archrivals Robert Fulton and Lake Harriet Schools of Minneapolis.
Students only had outhouses for bathrooms until about 1915 when the school was enlarged to eight rooms. Several more remodeling projects could barely keep up with population growth, and residents continually complained of overcrowding from the newly platted Morningside neighborhood and Country Club District.
Edina desperately needed a new school, but residents were deadlocked on where to build it, forcing the district to rent church and business space for overflow classrooms. Finally, after 11 bitter elections, School District 17 built two new schools in 1926, one on 42nd Street in Morningside and one at Fiftieth Street and Wooddale Avenue. The old school was demolished, and the bricks used to make a few of the many new homes being built by the next generation of Edina residents.
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Discover more about Edina schools by visiting the “Growing Up in Edina: A Show and Tell Exhibit” that opens Saturday, October 29, at the Edina History Museum. For information, go to the Edina Historical Society website or call 612.928.4577.
