Location: 43.00213, -83.21989, at 3085 Newark Road, Attica, MI.
Buckingham School is now a private residence owned by a very proud husband and wife who have done a lot to learn the history of their home as a schoolhouse and the adjacent cemetery and the surrounding region. They proudly display a schoolhouse sign (1st and 2nd photos below) along the street, asked me to go ahead and publish their address on this page so you can drive past the home if you'd like to.
Attica School, it's original name, was built as a log cabin building in 1882, either just east of the present building or at the corner of Bray and Newark. It burned down, and a replacement schoolhouse was built around 1900, on land loaned to the school by the White family, using wood donated by the nearby Buckingham Mill, and was therefore renamed Buckingham School.
A room was added to the back of the schoolhouse in the mid- to late-1950s to add indoor toilets, storage, and a furnace, all due to state demands. The school closed in 1961. In 1970, the school was converted to a residence, and the current owners, the 3rd to own the schoolhouse as a residence, bought it in 1996.
Physical Description
The schoolhouse has been extensively modified during its transition to a residence, but the essential clues to its history remain. It is a wood-frame structure, now nicely sided with blue shutters and a blue metal roof, all in wonderful shape. An interior tour of the schoolhouse provided to me by the current owner shows the original roof timbers (see below), so the rectangular main part of the building is unchanged from its original size, though divided into a second story and several rooms. The single front door remains, with evidence for cloak rooms on either side. The west side of the house (4th photo below) has three normal home-sized windows, which mark the bottom of the tall windows which once lit-up the schoolhouse with sunlight. The front two windows on the east side (5th photo) have been replaced with a picture window. There is no remaining bell tower on the roof, but the bell mounted to the top of a post near the front door, though not original, is a nice decorative touch best shown in the 3rd photo below.
The historical photos below are from 1947. The zoomed-in version of the schoolhouse itself (2nd photo below) is framed and displayed on an interior wall of the house.
Inside the home, an original door from the schoolhouse has been preserved and is still in use (1st photo below), and the original clapboarding (right edge of 1st photo below) on the rear wall of the schoolhouse has been preserved on what is now an interior wall. The interior of the back-most wall of the house, part of an addition built a few years ago, is decorated with salvaged roof boards that were removed during renovation (2nd photo below). Perhaps those boards came from Buckingham Mill? Original roof beams are visible in the views of the attic (3rd and 4th photos below). A root cellar still exists in the back yard (5th photo below), and original foundation fieldstones still support the schoolhouse (6th photo below).
The adjacent cemetery, cared for by the homeowners, has graves dated from 1870 to 1906, and several unmarked graves. The homeowner suggested there was a Civil War battle called "Bloody Alley" near here which might account for some of the unmarked graves, but I can find nothing about any such named battle, and I don't believe any Civil War battles were fought in Michigan. Nevertheless, something must account for these unmarked graves.