Classes stopped in 2003, but students visit on field trips
Published in the June 24 – July 9, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Staff Report
Photo by Marty Cheek
Visitors stroll through a former classroom and examine quilts during the school’s 120th birthday celebration.
Roxanne Elam drove 2,400 miles from Kentucky to Morgan Hill to attend a very special June 6 birthday party. Machado School, where she attended first grade in 1964, celebrated its 120th anniversary. The former school site has for decades been a special place for her and her family.
“My mother and her brother went for eight years here,” said Elam, whose last name was Applewhite when she attended. “And my mother’s mother and aunt and two uncles went here. I’m the third generation that went here.”
In the mid-1920s her grandmother’s family, the McKrights, moved to Paradise Valley to raise English walnuts on a farm and the children attended the old Victorian-style school building topped with a small old-fashioned bell tower.
“I loved it here because we had more one-on-one instruction,” she said. “You’d think that with four grades it would be different, but it wasn’t really.”
Her sister Wanda Metzen, who traveled from Chico for the anniversary event, recalled being in the large classroom in the second seat in the second row when on Nov. 22, 1963 someone came in and informed the teacher President John F. Kennedy had been shot.
The two sisters gazed at tables full of old photos of various classes dating back to the 1800s. Elam looked at a photograph of themselves as girls and noted: “We always had terrible hair in the photos. Our mom would snip our hair that day.”
Boys learn to rope a cow at the 120th anniversary party of Machado School. Photo by Marty Cheek
Elam thought about the good times in the school house. “This teacher here had this little box that was empty and if we did something that was good, she would twist the box all around and open it and it was full of bubblegum,” she said. “We were fascinated by that box. On Fridays if we had a good week, the bubblegum from that box was our treat.”
Dorothy Reed helped the sisters try to identify students in the photos. She taught at the school in the 1960s and ‘70s. The schoolhouse was built in that location because the nearby Llagas Creek would often flood during the rainy season and kids on the west side of the creek would miss too many days of school, she said of its origin. On June 5, 1895 the local farmer Bernard Machado donated 1.5 acres of land for a one-room school site and it was used for many decades by children from first to eighth grade. A second room was added in 1910. Machado had married Mary Murphy, a member of the pioneering Martin Murphy family.
“Bernard Machado was a Mexican cowboy and he married Mary Murphy against her parents’ wishes,” Reed said. “They really didn’t want their daughter to marry a cowboy. But she did. And they had quite a few children and needed a place to go to school.”
She recalled the flexibility of classroom days at Machado School compared to the district’s schools in town. “It was wonderful. We didn’t have the schedules like other schools, we didn’t have the bells ringing at us. We had a loose schedule. And sometimes we took recesses at different times.”
Reed’s son Anthony Goularte attended the school as a boy, and his attachment to it was so great he got involved in the Machado School Heritage Society, a nonprofit group of volunteers who have for 35 years raised money to maintain the building and grounds. The site was used as an elementary school until 2003.
“One of the conditions is that it could always be in the Morgan Hill Unified School District so long as it was a school,” Goularte said. “Well, we don’t have classes here any more, but we have kids come for field trips. The docents who work here are all volunteers and they dress up in period costumes so the kids feel like they’re coming to a school in the late 1800s.”
“We’re focusing on community groups and people who appreciate and respect the old building rather than just being a rental hall.”
Jan Strahan serves as the heritage society’s treasurer as well as coordinating the weekly field trips. Bringing the elementary students to the site during the school year helps them appreciate the historic past and a simpler time, she said.
“It’s important because most kids haven’t been to an old school and a lot of kids in Morgan Hill haven’t been out to the country,” she said. “They play differently out here. We have an imaginative playgroup for kindergartners and first graders. They’re down in the dirt playing with sticks, things that they couldn’t usually do.”
