Building to be designated ‘historic’

The red-brick Sisters High School building that opened in 1939 has been recommended for the National Register of Historic Places.

The State Historic Preservation Office in Salem confirmed Monday that the building’s application was approved last week by the State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation. That nine-member committee, appointed by the governor, meets three times a year and considers about 20 applications at each session.

It reviewed 17 at last week’s meeting, which was held in Jacksonville, an historic town in its own right. Dwight Smith of Sisters is a member of the advisory group but was unable to attend the Jacksonville meeting for health reasons.

After a few revisions, the Sisters application will go to the National Park Service, which administers the federal historic preservation program. The state office says it usually takes about six weeks for the appropriate federal officials to act on state applications.

The 1939 building at the east end of town north of Highway 20 operated as a high school until Sisters closed its high school for lack of funding in 1968 and began sending its high school students to Redmond. That dry spell ended in 1992 when the local district resumed high school operations in a new building on Highway 242 west of town. That building has housed the middle school since the high school moved to yet another new building further down the same highway in 2003.

Meanwhile, the original high school building has served some of the time as part of the middle school and some as an administrative office. Now, with a complete remodeling, it has become the district’s central administration office (see story, page 1).

The extensive written application for the national register, prepared with the help of consultant Michael Hall of Madras, stresses the 1939 building’s connection to the national effort to combat the Great Depression with public works projects. This was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, an innovative approach to shoring up the economy that made him a hero to the working class and anathema to the moneyed class.

The then-new Sisters High School received an $8,550 grant from the Public Works Administration to supplement a district bond issue of $14,000. At least three other Central Oregon school buildings received federal grants about the same time: Madras Union High School (1938), Madras Grade School (1939), and Prineville High School (1936).

The new Sisters school was built for a familiar reason, to relieve overcrowding. The existing six-room building that housed all grades through four years of high school was across Highway 20, where The Pumphouse store stands now.

“By the opening of school September 14, 1938, growth was troubling district officials. School opened with 147 students, with more expected. The building which had served both grade and high school students since 1912 was not large enough,” the application says.

The district had already taken action, however. In June of 1938 a petition signed by 15 residents was submitted to the school board asking it to call a bond election. The board did so, for a sum not to exceed $14,000. In an election on August 10 the measure passed 61 to 10.

The rest, of course, is history.