92-year-old oversees school house replica

92-year-old oversees school house replica
Middletown Journal
by Justin McClelland
12/3/12

Tom Mullet walks through piles of bricks and limestone with a sense of pride and a smile on his face. Mullett doesn’t see a pile of salvaged construction goods, but a future of learning for generations of school children.

“Liberty depends on education,” he said.

YMCA Camp Kern, a branch of the Greater Dayton YMCA, is constructing a replica of the Hart School, a one-room school house built in 1872 that once stood on Miller Road in Lebanon. The schoolhouse will be a central piece of Camp Kern’s pioneer village which is visited by thousands of elementary school students every year, said Dave Moran, the camp’s Outdoor Education Director.

The school is the culmination of a two-year odyssey of Mullett, a 92-year-old Otterbein and Lebanon resident, who wanted to preserve the original school in honor of his late wife, Ellen Miller Mullett, who attended the school as a child. When the school was found to be too fragile to move, Mullet paid to preserve what pieces of the school he could, including lime foundation, bricks, fixtures and the school stone steps, and will have them incorporated into the replica school being built on the Camp Kern grounds.

“It’s a piece of living history,” Moran said. “Students ‘travel’ through the area and see what life on the frontier was like.”

Jeff Merhige, executive director of YMCA Camp Kern, said the school will be part of the “living history program,” which will be used during field trips and summer camp programs.

To educate children about the underground railroad, the school is being designed with a secret underground passage that did not exist in the original Hart School, Merhige said.

Camp Kern is located on Ohio 350 in Turtlecreek Twp. The project received a donation from the Warren County Retired Teachers Association and the Warren County Historical Society donated a school bell that will be hung from atop the school, Merhige said. Camp Kern is still looking for donations of period furniture.
For more information, call (937) 478-6362.