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Special to the Rappahannock News
The 1914 Belle Meade schoolhouse went from being a storage building in near shambles to a restored schoolhouse with its original bell ringing again.
Mike Biniek and Susan Hoffman will open the schoolhouse doors again on Friday, June 27 from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
They are offering a free and open invitation to see the renovation of j the schoolhouse at a square dance. \ “It sounds like fun,” said Hoffman. “Why not do something joyful and fun? There are people around who went to school there who have been interested to see it fixed up.”
In 1998, the couple who run the Belle Meade bed and breakfast in Sperryville, succeeded in buying the boarded up schoolhouse adjoining their property. Hoffman said it took a while for them to purchase it.
According to “Rappahannock County, Virginia, A History-Fact Fiction Foolishness and Fairfax story” by Elisabeth Johnson and C.E. Johnson Jr., in 1914, Belle Meade was used as a two-room grade school.
Also in 1914 the school expanded to four rooms with two years high school. Around 1923 it no longer held high school level. All the students were white since integration had not occurred before the school house closed.
According to Lucia Kilby, whose husband, Irvin attended school there, the Belle Meade schoolhouse closed sometime between 1953 and 1955.
The schoolhouse and the Belle Meade bed and breakfast are located six and a half miles south of Sperryville.
In 2001, with the road two lanes, Biniek and Hoffman decided it would be best to move the entire building about 125 to 150 feet from the roadside.
After hiring a house mover from the eastern shore, they had to place large beams underneath the building, jack it onto a tractor trailer and put a harness around it.
Three months after they started, the schoolhouse was ready to move.
Hoffman refers to the day the bulldozer pulled the tractor trailer carrying the schoolhouse to its new location as “Moving Day.”
“From the beginning I just looked at it [the schoolhouse] and said, ‘You know, that’s a nice building.’ It’d be nice to fix up, see it come back to life,” said Hoffman.
The couple put in all new electricity, plumbing, dry wall, windows and roof tiles after they
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