Manhattan School | |
   | |
| Location | Gold St. bet. Mineral St. and Dexter Ave., Manhattan, Nevada |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 38°32′23″N117°04′30″W / 38.5396°N 117.0749°W Coordinates: 38°32′23″N117°04′30″W / 38.5396°N 117.0749°W |
| Area | less than one acre |
| Built | 1913 |
| Built by | McDonald, Angus |
| NRHP reference # | 06000108 [1] |
| Added to NRHP | March 8, 2006 |
The Manhattan School is a historic schoolhouse located on Gold Street in Manhattan, Nevada. Built in 1913, the school was the third in Manhattan. The first school had opened in 1906, shortly after a gold rush in the community, and the second opened in 1908; however, by 1911 the local school district had 65 students and had outgrown its original buildings. Manhattan's voters unanimously passed a bond proposal for the new school the following year. Area contractor Angus McDonald built the school the year after. Upon its completion, a benefit party was held at the school to provide money for its furniture and a piano. [2]
Manhattan is an unincorporated town in Nye County, Nevada, located at the end of Nevada State Route 377, about 50 miles (80 km) north of Tonopah, the county seat.
Nevada is a state in the Western United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast and Utah to the east. Nevada is the 7th most extensive, the 32nd most populous, but the 9th least densely populated of the U.S. states. Nearly three-quarters of Nevada's people live in Clark County, which contains the Las Vegas–Paradise metropolitan area where three of the state's four largest incorporated cities are located. Nevada's capital, however, is Carson City.
The single-story building has a vernacular design with a central entrance foyer, a hipped roof, a bell tower atop the foyer, and a flagstaff on the site of the roof. When the building was constructed, both the interior and exterior were covered by patterned metal plates. The plates were decorated based on their location; for instance, the plates on the outer walls were designed to resemble ashlar stone, and the plates on the roof resembled shingles. While most of the exterior plates have since been covered, the interior plates and the plates on the foyer's gable are still in place. [2]
A bell tower is a tower that contains one or more bells, or that is designed to hold bells even if it has none. Such a tower commonly serves as part of a church, and will contain church bells, but there are also many secular bell towers, often part of a municipal building, an educational establishment, or a tower built specifically to house a carillon. Church bell towers often incorporate clocks, and secular towers usually do, as a public service.
Ashlar is finely dressed stone, either an individual stone that has been worked until squared or the structure built of it. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, generally cuboid, mentioned by Vitruvius as opus isodomum, or less frequently trapezoidal. Precisely cut "on all faces adjacent to those of other stones", ashlar is capable of very thin joints between blocks, and the visible face of the stone may be quarry-faced or feature a variety of treatments: tooled, smoothly polished or rendered with another material for decorative effect.
The Works Progress Administration added an outhouse added outside of the school in the 1930s. While the WPA built 1,100 outhouses in Nevada, the outhouse is one of only three they built in southern Nevada. The outhouse is considered a contributing feature to the school's historic nature. [2]
The Works Progress Administration was an American New Deal agency, employing millions of people to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was established on May 6, 1935, by Executive Order 7034. In a much smaller project, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. The four projects dedicated to these were: the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), the Historical Records Survey (HRS), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP). In the Historical Records Survey, for instance, many former slaves in the South were interviewed; these documents are of great importance for American history. Theater and music groups toured throughout America, and gave more than 225,000 performances. Archaeological investigations under the WPA were influential in the rediscovery of pre-Columbian Native American cultures, and the development of professional archaeology in the US.
An outhouse, also known by many other names, is a small structure, separate from a main building, which covers a toilet. This is typically either a pit latrine or a bucket toilet, but other forms of dry (non-flushing) toilets may be encountered. The term may also be used to denote the toilet itself, not just the structure itself.
Manhattan's population dropped as its gold industry faded in the 1940s, and by 1955 the school closed, as it only had three students. Due to an increase in gold prices in the 1970s, though, Manhattan began to grow again. The school reopened as a library in the following decade. The Smoky Valley Library District acquired the library from the county in 2002 and subsequently renovated it to include a school and community center. [2]
The school was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 30, 2004. [1]
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance. A property listed in the National Register, or located within a National Register Historic District, may qualify for tax incentives derived from the total value of expenses incurred preserving the property.
