PAIR HELP BRING BACK A ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

There was a time you couldn't drive far into rural Sonoma, Lake or Mendocino counties without passing by one-room schoolhouses or their remains. By now most are torn down or collapsed or converted into homes or something else.

Workers are eager to begin prying at the more than century-old redwood timbers of one of the rare remaining schoolhouses, the derelict Daniels School west of Healdsburg. But the deconstruction won't mark the end of the decayed piece of history on dead-end Mill Creek Road.

This one, thanks to a neighborly effort that includes a soup-and-bread fundraiser on Nov. 12, will be restored to its 1890 look and condition. After years of planning, proponents of saving Daniels School have received Sonoma County Landmarks Commission permission to restore the structure.

If all goes well, a year from now the school's current see-through walls and decayed roof, ceiling and floor all will renovated, and new paint applied.

"It's going to be white and green," said Bonnie Cussins Pitkin, 67, a leader of the restoration effort. As she spoke, she sat on the steps of the time-grayed schoolhouse that her family owned until she and her husband, Richard, donated it and the half acre surrounding it to the Venado Historical Society (danielsschool.blogspot.com).

Venado was the community that the 16-by-26-foot school originally served, a settlement of magnesite miners, then sawmill workers, then prune growers. The building would probably be called Venado School but at some point after the turn of the 20th century, locals found it necessary to move it and a rancher named R.A. Daniels said he'd do the job -- if the schoolhouse were named after him.

"When it was moved here, we don't have the exact date," Pitkin said.

Both she and neighbor and restoration partner Gloria Egger, 72, attended Daniels School for just one year. They remember using a ladle to drink water from a bucket the students filled in Mill Creek, and the potbelly stove.

"All the parents would carry in wood, cut it and stack it," said Egger, a former real estate broker who now manages homeowners associations.

Pitkin, a retired schoolteacher, recalled, "There were Halloween parties here, dunking for apples. And always the big Christmas party."

She can see in her mind the curtain that was strung across the room on a clothesline, dividing the schoolhouse into stage and audience for the holiday production.

"I know I did 'The Night Before Christmas" in first grade," Pitkin said. That was in 1950, the year before Daniels School was closed and the students transferred to schools in the new Westside Union District.

The community effort to restore the schoolhouse was launched in 1998 by former Venado resident and Daniels School pupil Floramay (Cootes) Caletti, who's lived for decades now in Santa Rosa. She and Eloise Batchellor Hoffman, whose father was the Venado postmaster, raised and pitched in enough money to have a new foundation, steps and porch built several years ago.

Now Pitkin and Egger and their helpers are ready to raise the $40,000 to $50,000 they figure they will need to complete the restoration.

North County Supervisor Mike McGuire and Reg Elgin, a leader of the Pomo community, will speak at a soup-and-bread benefit from 1 to 3 p.m. on Nov. 12 at the restored Felta School on Westside Road.

Members of the Venado Historical Society anticipate that once Daniels School is restored, area schoolchildren will be invited in to see what life was like in a one-room school. They'll learn also about the Pomo Indians who were first on the land and the settlers who began to arrive in the second half of the 19th century and who worked as miners, loggers, mill operators and ranchers.

It could be that the restored schoolhouse also will become a place for neighborhood meetings, Pitkin and Eggers said.

More than 60 years after they played and learned at the simple wooden schoolhouse, the pair can't wait to see it look as it did back in simpler times.

"It's a way of life that existed and that no longer exists," Pitkin said.

Egger added, "And you knew it was a good way of living back then."