Photo of the Week

As a follow up with last week's posting from the personal collection from Dick White's uncle's collection. Mystery solved thanks to Bill Fall and Chuck Hummer who sent in other photos of the Balboa School.

Bill Fall sent me a paragraph that he extracted from The Canal Record Vol. VII, No 51 p 512 Aug 12, 1914

Schoolhouse—A temporary schoolhouse, to consist of four Type-5 bachelors’ quarters placed together, forming a 2-story building with a plan roughly resembling the letter “H,” is to be constructed across the Prado from the fire station. It will contain 14 class rooms, a laboratory, principal’s office, and retiring room for teachers. As part of the site, raised by dry fill, was originally about nine feet higher than the approach, it was found advisable to sink first the concrete footings in the lower part and then to distribute over this area the spoil from the excavation for footings in the higher part, thus giving the site a more nearly even grade. Concrete is now being poured for the last of the footing. Work on the proposed hotel, courthouse, post-office, sanitary inspector’s office, district physician’s office, permanent schoolhouse, and railroad station has not been begun. Work on the Administration Building, as recently review, includes a variety of finishing operations.

The photo above is a really great shot of a front view of the school with children that appear to be at recess. This photo was sent in by Bill Fall. The photo below sent in by Chuck Hummer gives you a good birds-eye view of where the school sat. This appears to be in the same location as the later constructed concrete school building. They must have had another location to place the students during the dismantling of the old wooden building while construction the new concrete building. In the photo below, there appears to be more construction of concrete housing going on just across the street from the school and beyond down Barnebey Street.

Thank you Bill and Chuck for helping out with this.