Shiloh School - Liberal, MO - Former Schools on Waymarking.com

County of school: Barton County
Location of school: Maple St & high school drive, Liberal
Built: 1869

"LIBERAL, Mo. - The final step in the saga of the Shiloh schoolhouse will take place Saturday when the volunteers who renovated the 136-year-old building open it to the public.

"Two years ago, Drenda Farrell was driving around the Liberal area when she saw the schoolhouse which, at the time, was six miles northwest of Liberal, vandalized and forgotten after a 1996 fire. She felt she should try to revive the building and helped organize volunteers into the Shiloh Schoolhouse Preservation Society. They will open the fully renovated schoolhouse at 2 p.m. Saturday at Liberal High School during the Liberal Prairie Days Festival.

"We want the kids to use it and appreciate where education has gone," Farrell said. "We want them to appreciate how things have changed and see what things were like for their great-grandparents."

"Society members renovated the building from the floor up, peeled off plaster from the walls, reroofed the building and installed new shingles on the exterior walls, said Vernie West, one of the volunteers and a former Shiloh student who graduated from eighth grade in the schoolhouse in 1948.

"The schoolhouse opened in 1869. It was built under the influence of Minerva Connor. She lost a son in the Civil War in 1862, and because she could not read or write and heard news of the war only by word of mouth, she assumed her son had died in the battle of Shiloh. Her husband and brother died after the war.

"Connor took some of the money her brother had left her to build the schoolhouse and dedicated it to the children of the Confederacy so they could learn to read. She named it Shiloh in the memory of the battle in which she thought her son had died. It was one of the first schools in Barton County.

"The Shiloh Schoolhouse Preservation Society did all of the work in rebuilding the schoolhouse using donated money. They also moved the schoolhouse to avoid the vandalism that plagued its former more rural location.

"Saturday, a brief ceremony will open the schoolhouse to the public as part of the Liberal Prairie Days Festival. A group of Confederate reenactors from Fort Scott, Kan., will perform, followed by games and songs reminiscent of 1869 from fourth-grade Liberal Elementary School students. Ceremonies will also include a memorial service for Timothy Farrell, a volunteer and Drenda Farrell's husband, who died in a car wreck during the renovations." ~ By Chadwick Watters Joplin Globe Staff Writer