Goodbye to Goldfield school
Nearly 70 years after it opened, and 16 years after its last students left, building will be demolished
GOLDFIELD — “The Flow” hasn’t been flowing for years.
A miniature gazebo at the corner of Main and Cedar streets shelters one of the many artesian wells in Wright County, but there’s no water at this one anymore. Every school day during the 1960s, a young girl walked past it from her house across the street on the way to the brand-new school on the west end of town.
A few weeks ago, that house came down, and the school is due to follow. This month, Judy (Lyons) Morrison, a 1970 graduate of Goldfield, walked its halls for the last time. (Special thanks goes to City Clerk Kathy Nelson for the opportunity to tour it.)
The beige brick building opened in fall 1956, shortly after the Goldfield Indianettes won the 1955 state girls’ basketball tournament — the first at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Home games in 1954-55 were played in the Legion hall, but the title trophy occupied a place of honor in the new school.
The championship trophy was one of a handful taken to Clarion. Otherwise, the gymnasium entrance this month looked pretty much like it did for decades. Senior class photo composites were removed for preservation, but all-school elementary photos remained, covering the 2000s to the last year in operation in 2008.
“Kindergarten, second, fourth, fifth, third, first,” Morrison said, pointing to each room clockwise from the center of the first-floor hallway. Grades 6-12 were upstairs, from the home economics room with four kitchens to the English classroom where, out the window, she watched and heard an athlete routinely pull up fashionably late in his blue Mustang. During the 1960s, the entire school would gather in the cafeteria to watch the rocket launches of the space race.
Morrison was in one of the first classes to spend its K-12 years entirely in the building. But 15 years after the school went up, enrollment was on its way down. Merger talk with Boone Valley of Renwick, 7.5 miles northwest of Goldfield, reached a vote. However, in January 1976, the proposed Goldfield-Renwick Community School District failed to get a majority in favor. The student population of each would plunge by 40% over the next decade.
In 1977, Boone Valley shut down an outlying school in Vernon Township. The new owner made the site an athletic club, only for it to be ruined by a tornado in 1984. The decaying gymnasium was finally plowed under in 2022.
The trophies left in the Goldfield school came from games, meets, and tournaments played against districts fading into history. Sheffield-Chapin and Meservey-Thornton and Rockwell-Swaledale, now all together as West Fork. Corwith-Wesley and LuVerne, finally absorbed into Algona last year. Kanawha. Klemme. Ventura, whose superstar Lynne Lorenzen dropped 93 points on Goldfield in this gym as a sophomore in a 1984 six-on-six game.
‘The beginning of the end’
“Despite considerable objection from the public and some impassioned pleas,” the Eagle Grove Eagle reported Sept. 11, 1985, the Goldfield school board voted after a three-hour discussion to send all students in grades 7-12 to Clarion full-time the following year. Goldfield already had been sending high school students to Clarion for part of the school day.
“This is the beginning of the end of our school,” resident Carrie Campbell told the board in the Eagle story. “We will be told that this is only more sharing. I say it’s voluntary consolidation.”
Twelve seniors made up the Class of 1986, Goldfield’s last. The last girls’ basketball game was a 78-75 overtime loss to the Clarion Cowgirls in Clarion. The final athletic event was a 1-0 loss in softball July 21 to Clarion in Belmond.
In the two years after that, Boone Valley tore itself apart. In 1988, one year after giving up its high school, it became Iowa’s first district in the modern era to voluntarily dissolve. It was too late for Goldfield to benefit. Humboldt got nearly two-thirds of Boone Valley’s area and Clarion nearly one-third.
In 1993, Clarion and Goldfield officially became Clarion-Goldfield. Goldfield Elementary would remain in use for another 15 years. After it closed in 2008, Iowa Central Community College had some classes there, but Clarion-Goldfield still used the gymnasium for middle school practices. The city of Goldfield made the space available for gatherings and all-school reunions.
The end of the end
The re-reorganized Clarion-Goldfield-Dows district just added another gymnasium at the elementary/middle school in Clarion. Now CGD doesn’t have a need for the Goldfield building, and with a separate community center, the city doesn’t either. It costs $50,000 a year just to keep the place functional. Classrooms have obvious water damage from a flat, leaky roof. The $172,000 cost to have it demolished is the logical if unfortunate thing to do.
On Friday, June 14, everything that wasn’t nailed down — and a lot that was — went up for sale. It wasn’t just the trophies and lunch tables. Chalkboards and lockers and cabinets and kitchen appliances that hadn’t moved since 1956 either would be coming out or coming down.
A couple dozen people came to the sale. Sara (Stevenson) Ahlers, a 1996 graduate of Clarion-Goldfield, was surprised to discover photos of her peers and brother’s friends still present upstairs, taped around a chalkboard. “Kate — and I can’t remember her name — Rasmussen, Tonya Stansberry, Tim Harvey, Mindy McCollough, Kirk Tokheim, Deana Nelson, Jody Fiscus, Katy Malloy.” She pulled a few off to save.
After walking through every room in the building multiple times, Morrison rested on the home team bench in the gymnasium and sat for a couple of pictures. Then she got up, stabilized herself with her cane, paid for a final box of trophies, and walked out.
Ron’s Restaurant, the Dari-Y, the Cheese Mart, the school, and the house on East Cedar Street are all either closed or gone. They and the dry fountain have succumbed to a different type of flow.
The flow of time.
My other work can be found on my website, Iowa Highway Ends, and its blog.
I am proud to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. If you’re interested in commentary by some of Iowa’s best writers, please follow your choice of Collaborative members: