Photo provided to the Times Observer The Elk Township Historical Society will be holding an open house at the Scandia School on Saturday from 1-4 p.m. The oldest building is the original one-room school building, which has been historically restored to its 1870s appearance. The parlor, pictured here, includes a matched set of Victorian furniture in antique velvet, including a settee, two side chairs and an armchair and an Estey reed organ was manufactured in Brattleboro, Vt., at one time the largest reed organ company in America. It had provided music in the Johnson homestead on the Schonberg Road in Scandia.

The public is invited to an Open House at the Scandia School and Museum on Saturday, Oct. 8, from 1-4 P.M.. Tour guides from the Elk Township Historical Society will be available to explain exhibits and answer questions.

The oldest building is the original one-room school building, which has been historically restored to its 1870s appearance. Here one can peruse over a century of enrollment records, class pictures and other memorabilia from many of the 12 one-room schools that once existed in Elk Township.

As more immigrant families arrived, enrollment mushroomed and the school room became inadequate to meet the needs of the community. To meet this need, another larger classroom was constructed by the parents, so that by I890, Scandia School had two functioning classrooms attached to one another. Water for drinking and handwashing was pumped from a hand-dug well. Two outhouses stood behind the school, one for each gender.

Today this larger room is the Historical Society’s Family Farm Heritage Museum and contains many interesting artifacts from that era. One corner is set up as a typical parlor of a late 19th C. farm, where the family gathered with their guests for conversation and entertainment. An item of interest on display is a horsehair upholstered chair. At that time, fabric woven from the long tail hair of horses was very popular for upholstery because of its durability, even though it could be fairly prickly in texture. The horse’s breed and management affected the texture of the hair and the quality of the woven fabric.

The parlor shown in the photograph, includes a matched set of Victorian furniture in antique velvet, including a settee, two side chairs and an armchair. The solid-walnut reed organ was often the center of entertainment as group singing was very popular when guests arrived. But they often stayed overnight because of the poor road conditions and lack of headlights on their buggies. This Estey reed organ was manufactured in Brattleboro, Vt., at one time the largest reed organ company in America. It had provided music in the Johnson homestead on the Schonberg Road in Scandia.

As one might expect, the pictures that decorated parlor walls on a 19th C. family farm featured the favorite subjects around which their lives were centered, such as farm animals. A large pastoral scene of grazing cattle is featured, which hung at one time in a 150-year-old house in Elk Township. Nearby is a brass child’s crib, that belonged to the Lanes, one of Scandia’s oldest families on the Peterson Road. In 1961, two new classrooms were constructed which provided indoor plumbing and a kitchen to the school.

Another nearby historic museum, The Shed, features antique cars, a wooden postmaster’s office window with mailboxes from a very old Pennsylvania Post Office, as well as an actual hunting camp.