The Schoolhouse: A Little Building With a Long Past

Before it was somewhere to stay, it was somewhere to learn.

Across the property from Blueberry's Farmhouse sits a much smaller red building. It would be easy to assume the Schoolhouse was simply added as another charming place for guests to stay, but its story stretches much further back than Blueberry Brook as we know it today.

Historical accounts date the Schoolhouse to 1855, when it served the early village of Stittville as a place for both education and worship. At times, more than forty children are said to have filled the single room to learn to read and write. During harvest season, attendance could drop considerably as children returned home to help on their families' farms.

The building reportedly cost just $400 to construct an almost impossible number to imagine when looking at it nearly two centuries later.

The Schoolhouse wasn't created to look like a piece of rural history. It was part of it.

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Today, its purpose looks very different. The one-room building has been transformed into Blueberry's smaller private stay, with space for two to three guests, a bathroom, kitchenette, antique furnishings, and the warm wood interior that gives the Schoolhouse so much of its character.

What makes it special, though, isn't simply that an old building was renovated. It's that you can still tell it had another life before this one.

The intimate scale, woodwork, windows, and shape of the room remind you that this was never intended to be a conventional house. Rather than trying to erase that history, its transformation gave the building another reason to be used and cared for.

That's also what makes the Schoolhouse such an interesting counterpart to the Farmhouse. Where the Farmhouse is expansive, layered, and filled with rooms that lead into still more rooms, the Schoolhouse is smaller and more contained—a little world of its own.

For two or three people, that means experiencing Blueberry on a more intimate scale while still having the rest of the property just beyond the front door.

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There's something wonderful about imagining the different lives this little building has already lived. Generations ago, children gathered here for lessons and members of the surrounding community came together for worship. Today, someone might wake beneath the same roof on a quiet Saturday morning, make coffee, and look out across Blueberry without knowing exactly what happened here nearly two centuries earlier.

The purpose has changed. The past hasn't disappeared.

And maybe that's one of the best things about old places: preservation doesn't have to mean turning them into museums. Buildings survive when they're cared for, adapted, lived in, and given reasons to remain part of people's lives.

The Schoolhouse has already moved through more than one chapter—from a place of education and worship to a place where people can stay and experience Blueberry today. Yet through every version, people have continued gathering beneath its roof.

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Perhaps that's what makes its newest chapter feel so fitting.

The lessons may be different now, but the little Schoolhouse is still doing what it has done for generations:

welcoming people inside.

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