What we know
One-story frame school with a cross-shaped plan, on both Sanborn maps; in 1900 'Heat: stoves. No lights.' (S-0147). The address point of the brick Inez J. Lewis School of 1920, which replaced Monument's three-room school (PPLD record of survey B70), is about 160 feet west; that this building was the three-room school is likely but not stated. Lavelett and Koch say Monument's first school was a log building that stood where the D&RG tracks were laid and was moved, when the railroad came, to 'just north of the Dirty Woman Gulch'; the three-room frame school of the 1880s followed (S-0011, p. 41; S-0197, p. 158). Case's belief that the first school was the small building on Front Street later used as a sewing shop (S-0110) has no support in either.
Where it was
East of Jefferson Street between First and Second (an inset on the 1900 sheet), on the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Monument, sheet 1, Nov. 1895 and Oct. 1900 (Library of Congress, S-0147); placed by fitting the sheet to today's Front, Washington and Jefferson street crossings at 1st and 3rd streets (six points, each within about 15 feet of the fit). Good to about a hundred feet.
Sources
- S-0011: Lucille Lavelett, Through the Years at Monument, Colorado: The Story of Monument, Colorado, 5th printing (Palmer Lake: Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2004); first published Colorado Springs: Valliant Press, 1975
- S-0017: Pikes Peak Library District, Regional History & Genealogy
- S-0101: Elaine Freed and David Barber, Historic Sites & Structures, El Paso County, Colorado ([Colorado Springs]: prepared for the El Paso County Land Use Department, [1977]), 56 pp., with the survey photographs in PPLD's Historic Sites and Structures collection
- S-0104: El Paso County GIS: address locators and parcels
- S-0110: Linda Saulnier Case, "Monumental Happenings and Histories" (The Tribune, 2018–2019), part of S-0108
- S-0147: Sanborn-Perris Map Co., Monument, El Paso County, Col., fire-insurance maps, sheet 1, November 1895 and October 1900 (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps collection)
- S-0197: Susan E. (Steppler) Koch, The Land Is In My Blood: The History of The Divide Country and Its Pioneers, complete with Driving Tour and Homestead Maps (self-published; copyright 2015, U.S. Copyright Office TXu 2-251-186; first printing 2008, second October 2015, this copy the third printing, fall 2018)
Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.