Michigan's oldest schoolhouse hides in a state park

The stones came out of the field. In 1847, settlers southwest of Ionia gathered the cobbles and rough fieldstone that plows kept turning up and laid them into the walls of a school — a single room about 20 by 24 feet, heated by one stove, with every grade crammed in together under one teacher. The Sessions Schoolhouse is still standing, and it is believed to be the oldest surviving schoolhouse in Michigan. It went up fourteen years before the Civil War and outlasted nearly everything built around it.

The man behind it was Alonzo Sessions, a New York schoolteacher who came to Ionia County in the 1830s and went on to serve as Michigan’s lieutenant governor — a country schoolmaster who ended up second in the state. Classes ran in his little stone building until 1898. Then it took a turn nobody plans for a schoolhouse: it became a “pest house,” a place to isolate people sick with contagious diseases, well away from town. A local group rescued and restored it in 1918, and it landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

You’ll find it on Riverside Drive in Berlin Township, on land that’s now folded into the Ionia State Recreation Area — which means a one-room school built by farmers in 1847 now sits surrounded by campers and trailheads. It’s a small gray box of a building, easy to drive past, and it has been teaching, or quarantining, or simply standing, for the better part of two centuries.