DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way back in 1880, a group of German immigrants out in the Bartlett area did what settlers have always done when they put down roots somewhere they mean to stay. They built a school.
They called it the Indian Creek School at first, but names have a way of bending to the will of the people who use them every day, and before long folks were calling it something else entirely. The German-English School. And when you hear what went on inside those walls, that name makes all the sense in the world.
Come winter, the lessons were taught in English. Come summer, German. Two languages, one roof, one community trying to hold onto the old world while making its way in the new.
Now this school didn't stand alone out there. It was closely tied to St. John's Lutheran Church, so closely that the two shared the same facilities for years.
Then in 1896, the congregation built a proper church sanctuary, and the school and the church each had a little more room to breathe. The German-English School kept on doing what it had always done, season after season, until 1948, when it finally closed its doors as a school. But here's the part that gets me.
That building wasn't done yet. The community kept right on using it, gathering there for functions well into the early 1960s. Some buildings just refuse to stop serving.
This one held two languages, two seasons, and the better part of a century before it finally stepped back and let the quiet in.
What the marker says
Established by German immigrants in 1880, the German-English School was an early school in the Bartlett area. First called Indian Creek School, the name was changed due to popular usage and the nature of instruction, which was in English during the winter and and German during the summer. Closely associated with St. John's Lutheran Church, the school shared facilities with the church until 1896, when a church sanctuary was built. The school was closed in 1948, but the building remained in use for community functions until the early 1960s. (1988)