Groom Creek Schoolhouse

The Senator Highway begins where Mount Vernon Street runs out at the south end of Prescott and climbs into the Bradshaw Mountains. About six miles out, a sign points east to a one-story building of rough granite set some 300 feet back from the road. This is the Groom Creek School. It stands at about 7,000 feet at the eastern base of Spruce Mountain, under tall ponderosa pine.

The road is older than the school. A Forest Service motor-tour brochure says it was built in 1866–1867 as the main route to the mining camps. Its first six miles were part of the Prescott & Lynx Toll Road, which charged 25 cents for a horse and rider and $1.25 for a wagon. The road took its present name in 1875, when Senator Mine owner Samuel O. Fredricks cut an extension to his mill.

Fieldstone at the foot of Spruce Mountain

The 1992 National Register nomination says the walls are uncoursed native granite fieldstone, collected from the immediate area. They are laid in a vernacular manner that reflects the National Park Service Rustic style. The building is an end-gable rectangle, 26 by 54 feet, symmetrical in its massing.

The entry porch sits on the south side under a cross gable, facing south and slightly east. It measures seven by ten feet and rests on granite pillars that taper from three feet square at the base to two feet at the top. Corrugated steel covers what appears to be the original wood-shingle roof, and the rafter tails are left exposed.

Inside, a vestibule opens left into a small kitchen and an auditorium area, and right into the classroom. Two restrooms sit at the far end of the classroom. Two pairs of bi-fold doors stand between the classroom and the auditorium area, and when they are opened the two become one large room. The classroom floor is oak hardwood, and the walls are plaster over lath. A chimney at the rear once served two wood stoves, one in the classroom and one in the auditorium. The Forest Service now furnishes the two rooms with tables and chairs. The Sharlot Hall Museum notes that the chalkboards are still intact.

A flagpole stands about 50 feet due south of the entry. It rises from a base of two stacked granite rounds, six and three feet across, built at the same time as the school. Low granite retaining walls, from a few inches to about two feet high, edge the old playground to the east and north. A large, flat outcrop of granite there was a favorite place to play, according to the nomination. A garage and coal bin that once stood east of the building are gone.

Picnic tables now fill the old lunch ground under the pines, near a small amphitheater. The Prescott Sunrise Lions’ Club Nature Trail winds about 1,500 feet around the site. It is paved, open to wheelchairs, and carries tactile displays for visitors with impaired vision.

The plants around the site are ponderosa pine, Utah juniper, Gambel oak, mountain mahogany, Emory oak and New Mexican locust. Wildflowers come up in spring and again in the summer monsoon. Afternoon thunderstorms are possible from late June through mid-September. Deer, bobcats, coyotes, foxes and mountain lions use the forest, and the Forest Service has posted a notice about bear activity around Prescott. There is no drinking water on the site.

Groups reserve the schoolhouse from April 1 to October 31 and enter through a gate with a combination lock. When no group is present, other visitors may use the outdoor area. The rest of the time, the Forest Service uses the building for administration and training.

Six weeks as Oakdale

The nomination dates the settlement of Groom Creek to around 1864. It began as a camp of miners working placer gold along Groom Creek and Link Creek, which was later renamed Lynx. The place is named for Colonel Bob Groom. He was born in Kentucky on August 24, 1824, came to Arizona in 1862, and lived mostly by mining and prospecting. He also surveyed the Prescott townsite and sat in the first Arizona Territorial Legislature. He died January 21, 1899.

More people came up in summer as the century closed, but few stayed through the winters. By 1901 enough lived there year-round to justify a post office. It opened July 1, 1901 under the name Oakdale, after a large grove of oaks. That name lasted about six weeks, and on August 19, 1901 it was officially changed to Groom Creek. A townsite for Groom Creek City was recorded with the county in 1903, though the town was never incorporated. The nomination says the post office was discontinued January 31, 1942. The motor-tour brochure gives 1919 instead.

The school district came before the post office. Groom Creek School District Number 39 was apparently organized July 16, 1894. It first appears in the Yavapai County schools census in 1895, with Mrs. Alice B. Elliott as teacher. School usually closed for the winter, when families moved down to Prescott, about 1,700 feet lower.

Classes met wherever room could be found, sometimes in donated buildings. If the teacher lived in Groom Creek, sometimes in the teacher’s own home. The settlement sign records that the ten to fifteen pupils came only after chores like cutting fuelwood, hauling water and feeding stock. Teachers boarded with local families, and room and board counted as part of their salary. The brochure adds that one teacher usually handled all the grades, though old records show two were sometimes hired.

One schoolhouse, several building dates

The sources disagree about when the present building went up.

• The Forest Service and Recreation.gov: the school was built in 1902.
• The Forest Service regional cabin-rental page: the school was established in 1896 as a wood building and rebuilt of native stone in the 1930s.
• The motor-tour brochure: the school was established in 1894.
• Kristen Kauffman, writing for the Sharlot Hall Museum in 2023: the first schoolhouse on record dates from 1896, and the school moved several times before “Country School #39” was built in about 1902. She describes that building as river rock over a wooden interior, “proving so durable that it exists today.”
• The settlement sign: it also gives about 1902. It describes two rooms heated by wood until gas came in 1935, and indoor restrooms added the same year. It adds that the district paid the Prescott National Forest $16 a year to lease the land.

The 1992 nomination tells it another way. It says a purpose-built school, 24 by 30 feet, went up in 1903 and needed repairs by 1933. In 1935 the district applied to the Forest Service for a 2.0-acre lease. The present building was then constructed over the 1935, 1936 and 1937 school years and opened in September 1937. The Register lists its significant years as 1937 and 1952.

County records show the district survived while many of Yavapai County’s rural schools closed or consolidated. In May 1920 it closed early because of bad weather and several epidemics.

Biscuits, tobacco tins and a stove lit before class

The school taught grades one through eight. It also held recitals, dances, concerts, plays, community meetings and picnics. During fire season it served as a base for fighting fires in the area.

Mittie Cobey went to school there in the 1930s. She remembered her father walking her in after a bad snowstorm and lighting the fire in the wood stove for the teacher, Mrs. Hyde. Her mother brought her lunch every day, usually biscuits.

Les Eckert was born in Groom Creek in 1902. He told of a classmate who slipped to the back of the room while the others studied. The lunch pails there were mostly tobacco tins with handles and lids, and the boy ate all the cakes and sweets out of them until he was caught and disciplined. The Sharlot Hall Museum holds a photograph of the students at the end of the 1937–1938 school year.

The building stayed an active school until 1952. In 1967 the district gave it to the Prescott National Forest by quitclaim deed. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 18, 1992, as entry 92001568. The nomination found the setting essentially as it had been. The only changes it listed were the modern restrooms, the asphalt trail, the picnic tables, the split-rail fences and the parking lot.