Location: 42.57818, -83.14990, originally at the northwest corner of Crooks & Big Beaver, moved to Troy Historic Village, 60 W Wattles Rd, Troy, MI.
Poppleton School (Troy District No 8) was built in 1877 at the northwest corner of the intersection of the mud Big Beaver and Crooks Roads on land owned by William Poppleton, who owned 1200 acres in Troy Township. Boys sat on one side of the classroom and girls on the other. In 1925, that single-room schoolhouse was connected to a large addition shown in the first photo below. But by 1975 high-rise office buildings and corporate headquarters dominated Big Beaver road. The schoolhouse, no longer in use, was to be demolished but the Troy Historical Society decided to relocate the building to the Troy Historic Village. The problem was, though, that the building was too heavy to move over I-75 and too tall to transport under an overpass, so instead, the schoolhouse's architecture was carefully document, disassembled, and recreated at the new location on a fieldstone foundation in 1980. Today, a strip mall and fast food restaurants are found on that corner, and cars and trucks zip by on the smoothly-paved roads which hide the mud tracks below.
The rectangular red-brick schoolhouse has been meticulously restored, with the original school bell being installed in the original schoolbell tower. The sign reading "Troy District No 8, 1877" stands above the front door, with a round window above it. Two large arched windows stand on the front face, one on either side of the door. Three large arched windows are on both sides of the schoolhouse, letting in plenty of light for the students to learn their reading, writing, arithmetic, penmanship, history and geography. There is much beautiful projecting brickwork on this building. An arch of non-projecting edge-on bricks stands directly above each window and the front door, with then another identical row projecting out from the surface. A single circle of projecting edge-on bricks edges the round window near the peak of the front face of the building. Above that, under the roof line, is a pattern of projecting and non-projecting bricks and dental details, laid at the angle of the roof lines. The corners of the school house project on each side for a width of 2-1/2 bricks, and a 3-brick-wide "pillar" separating each side window from the others is made from projecting bricks.
