Elmwood School

On Wednesday, July 30, we shared a new WHERE is it Wednesday photo on our Facebook page:

Where could this be?

We really had a lot of great guesses with this one! Most people noticed that the photo showed a paving crew and there was a lot of speculation as to where in Springfield this could be. Guesses included Fountain Avenue, Limestone Street, High Street, and Lagonda Avenue. There were several people who recognized the school in the background (which was the big giveaway) as Elmwood School, which was located at 280 S. Clairmont Avenue.

When the photo was donated to us in 2012, the donor did not provide any identifying information, so we did our own detective work to discover the location. We started off in the wrong direction with a suggestion that this was Sunset Avenue around 1932. We did a little bit of scouting back in our archives, through the city directories, and on Sunset Avenue in person and found some promising matches on houses and learned that architect Robert Gotwald had built Trinity Evangelical Lutheran on Sunset in 1913. Although the building in the background didn’t look very churchlike, it DID look like a Gotwald building to us. Luckily, one of our volunteers thought to flip through the Harry Laybourne “Springfield, Ohio Revisited” photo book and was able to match the building as Elmwood School. We did a bit more research and found the dedication program and learned that Robert Gotwald had also been the architect for Elmwood School in 1903.

Elmwood School, built 1903

We also wanted to share with you some more interesting finds from our collections: a 1931 map of Springfield showing the paved streets highlighted in yellow, Bomag road roller models donated last year, Kelly Springfield and Buffalo Springfield road roller photos from catalogs in the archives, and repair on an unpaved N. Fountain following the February 1929 flood.