Wildflowers

Lorna Grabe: a mess of garbage to pick up, so we've taken out the picnic. We don't use it for picnics except our one controlled picnic in July, we invite the old students. Also at the beginning, someone said people could use it for community meetings, and we don't permit that now because ... my personal feeling, and some of the other members on the board too, that as soon as the building is used by other groups that they tend to move in their equipment and destroy the personal ... the historical integrity of the place ... they would like folding chairs and lights and telephone and clock and wall to wall carpeting and big lights outside and so we have kept it strictly as a historical site without club meetings; that's the way it is now.

Bob Zybach: Also the ... wild flowers, is that kind of an official function of the School House now to preserve and enhance the surrounding with wild flowers, or are you enough of a purist to want to go back to school yard where there may have been a May pole or other play ground equipment?

Lorna Grabe: Well, I'm a purist enough that I wouldn't want people to come in and landscape it with exotic species. I want to keep exactly what's there, the flowers ... not exactly, the flowers that are wild flowers that are growing there, and to do this, we have just let the man ... asked Jim Neidig that mows the grass, just once a year. He mows the grass in the summer, because some of the people thought that if we didn't mow it, it would look like nobody cared about it. And we do

Lorna Grabe: care about it, but we don't want to destroy the flowers, and as soon as you mow it, you're destroying the seeds, you know. And so no matter when you go down there, even in the middle of summer, it's full of wild flowers. Some of the bigger grasses like this tall fescue are moving in now and that may give us some problems. This year I had to dig out a couple this s, and Bessie Murphy suggested we dig out those clumps of fescue even, because pretty soon those could move in and just completely squelch out the wild flowers.

Bob Zybach: There's one reason for the wild flowers are Indian burning practices, any talk at all about maybe for fire safety and for maintaining the wild flowers and controlling the grasses by using a small controlled burn.

Lorna Grabe: Since Dick Green is on the fire station; he's on our board, and he's also in the fire station volunteer group, and he's very ... he would die if we had a fire there, I think, on that property anyway.

Bob Zybach: So that was never seriously discussed?

Lorna Grabe: I don't think he would want any fires there, because he's real cautious about fire. He's concerned that we don't have fires around there for the protection of the school property, the house and stuff, it's so old and tinder dry that they could go up in a minute, I think.

Bob Zybach: Of course, that's one of the arguments for having controlled burns is that you burn everything away from the building and removes all the flammable

Lorna Grabe: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: And it's also a method of maintaining and encouraging wild flowers.

Lorna Grabe: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: So, to summarize the transition from the start again, and then I want to go kind of gradually through who the members are and that. You can say that's it's gone from a community activity and from just preserving the structure itself to now historical re-creation of the building and an emphasis more on native plants...

Lorna Grabe: Well

Bob Zybach: ... from picnics.

Lorna Grabe: The outside. Yes, we have a very ... about two years ago, we discovered a very rare wild orchid back by one of the toilets, and this year I saw five of them back there plus one by the north side of the school house, so I think we have a real treasure there, and so we're cataloging our wild flowers and documenting them, I mean, and making pictures and labeling, Bessie Murphy is helping us with this. And so, we're trying to write down our plants, we haven't done our trees yet. We're working on our wild flowers.

Bob Zybach: Is the tendency to find these rare plants and show them to people and educate them about them or find these rare plants and hide them away so nobody disturbs them? Or have you got that far yet?

Lorna Grabe: It depends ... when we have our open houses, we put up our signs and tell people what the names of them are and also for our picnic in the summer, so we tell people what the names of them are, in fact one of the pictures in this scrap book is of a display Bessie Murphy had of wild flowers which I don't know if this was a good idea or not because she dug them up out of her own yard and then brought them out and displayed them and told people the names of them and then apparently replanted them back which this was done back in about 1969 or '70 or somewhere in there that she did that.

Bob Zybach: Bessie Murphy has been involved with the School House Foundation... Yes.

Bob Zybach: ... right from the beginning?

Lorna Grabe: Right. Well, she hasn't

Bob Zybach: From early on?

Lorna Grabe: She's brought out displays. She's come out quite a few different times, we've had her ... she's quite a great historian. She knows so many things about the early valley, and she also has a collection of old buttons; we've had her display her old buttons and then another time, she has come