6306 State Hwy 23

Summary

Wyoming Valley School
6306 State Highway 23, Town of Wyoming, Iowa County
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Construction Date: 1957

When the Town of Wyoming’s school board finally decided to consolidate its six rural one-room school houses in 1956, they turned to their famous neighbor, Frank Lloyd Wright, for a design for the new two-room school that they needed. Wright’s response was prompt and generous and within a year his new school was finished, much to the delight of the Town’s school children. Wright’s special enthusiasm for this project can perhaps be explained by the fact that Wyoming Valley was of enormous importance in his life. In this valley Wright spent summers as a boy on the farms of his mother’s relatives and years later one of these same Wyoming Valley farms became the site of his celebrated Wisconsin home, Taliesin, which is located 2.5 miles further south on Highway 23. This same farm also became the setting of the Hillside Home School that he designed for two of his mother’s sisters, Jane and Ellen Lloyd Jones. This school building was built in 1903 and it later became the home of the architecture school Wright created that is known as the Taliesin Fellowship and it is now part of the Taliesin Complex.

In order to ensure that the Township’s new school would be built as designed, Wright donated his fee for the design, he paid $750 for two acres of land that he wanted to add to the original three-acre school site, and he also donated an additional $7,000 over and above the $45,000 cost of the school, this last sum being used to complete the school’s assembly room, which he dedicated to the memory of his mother, Anna, her two sisters, all three of whom were teachers. The completed building served as the Town of Wyoming’s school until 1988, after which it was sold into private ownership. Today, the building serves as a local cultural center and it is open to the public when public events are taking place there. In addition, the original one-room clapboard-clad school that was built in 1875 to serve this part of the township is also still intact, it is now the Town Hall, and it is located immediately adjacent to the Wright-designed building that replaced it and makes for a fascinating comparison.

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