Loop Back: Why A School Caught Fire And Neighbors Cheered
One of the first schoolhouses built by pioneers in Minneapolis was near the corner of 7th and Washington Avenues North. It was named Lincoln School and it opened in 1867, just two years after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
In the photo above, you can see the trees that shaded part of the school yard.
But by the turn of the century, Lincoln School was in such bad shape, some neighbors were actually delighted when it caught fire in 1900.
They had been complaining for years that it was dilapidated, dangerous and unsanitary–no plumbing or sewer systems at a time when smallpox was a concern. And the railroad tracks serving the quickly-expanding Warehouse District were now guiding trains within 25 feet of the playground behind the school.
At one school board meeting, the Reverend C.B. Moody said, “If I lived in the district and had twenty-five children, I would let them grow up in ignorance before I would allow them to go to that school.”
Lack of funding was always blamed for the lack of progress. But after the fire, the school board officially put the building up for sale. And by 1903, most of the students were attending classes at another school nearby, at North 3rd Street and 12th Avenue North–everyone except for the youngest ones.
The kindergarteners were still in the building when it caught fire again in September of 1904. And the colorfully-written Tribune article about that incident almost reads like the script for a Broadway musical.
The principal’s first instinct when flames broke out was to head to the piano. Miss Nettie White “struck the signal chord for every pupil to rise,” the Tribune reported. “Then, to the cheering music of a march, the pupils proceeded into the yard.”
The teachers gathered the children’s belongings and brought them outside. “By that time the upper story was blazing merrily,” the reporter wrote, “and many of the children learned why they had come out of the building only when they saw the flames and smoke.”
After this fire was extinguished, neighbors and parents finally got their wish. The school was abandoned completely.
Still, the property stayed on the market for a dozen more years until International Harvester came along and bought it to build a new warehouse/showroom there in 1916. Today, it’s a luxury condo building known as Harvester Lofts.
Please explore the Historic North Loop section of this website for many more fun photos and articles about our neighborhood’s history.
By Mike Binkley, North Loop volunteer*
(*not an actual historian; I just pulled together information from newspaper archives, public records, online searches and most helpfully, the digital archives at the Hennepin County Library)