HOPS
looking back
Ocala Primary School 1965
Ocala Primary School 1910
School Board today
A simple building with a momentous past BY CARLTON REESE WITH THE HISTORIC OCALA PRESERVATION SOCIETY
A
t first glance, the Marion County School Board administration building might not appear to have much of a story to tell. A fairly nondescript two-story building located downtown and with no architectural features to dazzle the historic sensibilities, the structure serves an important purpose today quite different from its origins. Located at 513 SE 3rd St., the building is home to Marion County School Board meetings as well as offices for some of the school system administration. It all seems rather pedestrian, but its purpose today is quite profound. Before there was ever a structure there, a baseball field stood on this piece of land. In 1907, this would begin to change as $7,000 was allocated by the government to build a school there; and the project would be completed in 1908. The result was a two-story brick Vernacular-style building with Utilitarian architectural features that would become the Ocala Primary School with an enrollment of 175 students. Adorned with high ceilings and sunlit rooms, the school also housed four large study halls, a cloak room and an entrance hall. Its utility was undeniable as even into the 1960s, enrollment at the school had reached 300. Multiple generations of Ocalans, many still residing here, would attend the school and still hold fond memories of the
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old building. Diane Koontz attended first through sixth grades there and would later teach fourth grade in 1961 when it was called Central Elementary School. “I remember one day I was teaching and about a million birds flew in through the window and dropped all their berries,” Koontz remembers. “There was also a student, Eric Lewis, whose dog would follow him to school almost every day and would come up the fire escape and just stay there. He didn’t bother anyone and we just let him stay there. Today, everybody’d be scared to death and would never let a dog there.” In the early days, students were allowed to leave campus for lunch then return for classes. Koontz has fond memories of her second grade teacher, Ms. Humphries, who would award students with a dime to go by the nearby White Store to purchase a goody. “She would let us walk over there with that dime, and I would always get a banana popsicle.” By 1966, with the construction of other schools, the building was converted into offices for the School Board with the main alterations including the covering of the huge windows on the exterior, the same windows those birds would fly in and out. Today, there are still many citizens of Ocala who remember walking the halls of this building as a school, and recent pro-
posals to have the building razed have been quite disconcerting. The memories and the history that are housed in this modest structure are invaluable and part of the cherished local history that is to be preserved by all reasonable measures. In September, the School Board approved planning a new $41 million facility on the location of the current building. Some current board members and concerned citizens are hoping the project never gets off the ground in order to preserve this small piece of Ocala history. The search for a spot to build a 90,000-square-foot facility has been ongoing for years, but it seems constructing on the land around the current building has the most traction. “It would be sad for me and a lot of us,” Koontz said of the possible razing of the old school building. “I’d like to see them restore it to the way it was. It seems like such a waste – I think the School Board offices should be away from downtown. It’s only going to keep growing, so what are they going to do, eventually tear down the old high school (currently Osceola Middle School)?” Currently, everything is in the proposal stage, but every day the voices of preservation for this historic place grow louder and louder. Once the building is razed, it will be gone forever and with it yet another symbol of Ocala’s glorious past.
