Tony Giordano and his wife, Renee, never intended to buy or restore the one-room schoolhouse on Church Road in Eldred Township.

The couple is just a few doors down the road from the schoolhouse, and one day when they were driving down the road they saw a “for sale” sign on the school.

“We thought maybe Eldred Township might want to take it on as a project, but unfortunately the township did not have the funds to put into the aging structure,” he said.

The couple spent some time thinking about what a wonderful piece of history the school was and how it should not be lost.

“Basically, we just had to do something,” the couple said.

Unwilling to see such an important part of Eldred’s history just gradually fall into a pile of boards, the Giordanos became the happy owners of the greatly in need of repair Frantz schoolhouse.

The “Frantz Schulhaus” was built by the Frantz family in about 1850. The school was used for a short time as a residence after it was closed, but amazingly the interior remains very much the way it did the day Mrs. Hawk dismissed her final class in 1946.

The Giordanos bought the schoolhouse in 2014 but did not actually start doing anything with it until 2015.

“I didn’t want to apply for a grant because if we were to get a grant, it might have taken money away from Eldred Township’s projects, and we didn’t want to do that,” he said.

Restoring the Frantz schoolhouse

Everything so far in the restoration has come out of couple’s pocket.

One of the first projects they tackled was the slate roof.

Water over the years had seeped under the slate shingles. The building had started to bow out on the sides from the weight of the heavy slate shingles on top of the wet, rotted wood underneath, Giordano said.

They admit at their age it has been hard work restoring the schoolhouse.

“We are old,” he said.

The couple worked hard, and little by little as they got the inside of the school cleaned up and the desks organized, they became more familiar with the building and started to explore the attic.

“I can’t believe the original desks were still there and no one had stolen them,” Giordano said.

One of the prize pieces recovered from the attic was a long bench, but it was not until they invited the neighborhood to come see what they had done so far that they learned the purpose for the bench.

“We gave them fair warning that the only way to see inside the schoolhouse was a piece of plywood that served as a ramp,” he said.

One person who was awfully familiar with the Frantz School was then-99-year-old Mrs. Constance Andrews, who had once been a teacher in the one-room schoolhouse.

“Mrs. Andrews insisted she was going up that piece of plywood and going inside the school, and she did,” Giordano said.

When asked if she knew what the long bench was used for, she explained the grades were from one through eight and the teacher would call each grade one at a time to come up and sit on the bench while she gave the students their assignments. Then those students would go back to their desk and do their work, and the next grade would come up and get their assignments.

Andrews, who recently turned 104, is still involved in the basic restoration of the inside and the decorating in the school room.

Thanks to her memories, the inside closely resembles the classroom where she taught so many years ago.

When the retired teacher asked Giordano what was missing in the school room, at first he was at a loss, but then suggested a picture of the president.

That is when Andrews looked at him and said, “All schoolhouses hung portraits of President George Washington and President Abe Lincoln.

“COVID-19 has caused an unusually long sabbatical, but as soon as we can open up, we plan to have lots of events in the Frantz one-room schoolhouse,” Giordano said.

Records find a new audience online