Location: 42.19110, -84.03716, at 19811 W Pleasant Lake Rd, Just West of M52, in Manchester, Michigan.
Sharon School (Sharon District No 1) was built in 1890 and now stands beside a companion tree in a large field. The red-brick schoolhouse has no bell tower but still has its chimney at the rear of the building under which a pot-belly stove once heated the schoolroom. A sign above the front door states "Sharon District N 1, 1890". The shingled roof looks to be recently replaced, and decorative corbels support the eaves of the roof. Following the Standard Michigan schoolhouse design guidelines, two large windows stand on either side of the front door within the front vestibule, and 3 large windows on each side of the schoolhouse let light into the classroom to illuminate the students' work. The front window on one side has been converted into a small secondary doorway. The detail I love most on this schoolhouse (well, beside that it stands with only it's companion tree in a huge otherwise-empty field) are the brick arches above the windows and the door, perhaps best seen in the final photo below. Directly surrounding the window or door is an single row arch of edge-on bricks at the same depth as the rest of the wall surrounding the window. Surrounding that is a slightly-projecting row arch of edge-on bricks, and surrounding that is an even-more-projecting edge-on-sideways row arch of bricks. I suspect this is a rather simple job for a skilled brick mason to achieve, at only slightly more labor cost, but what a great visual impact it has on a building for the 120-year lifetime of this particular schoolhouse.
