Swan's Island: Six miles east of ordinary

The Minturn Schoolhouse was built in 1899, probably replacing an earlier school at the same location. There were two floors to the school, with the older students upstairs. Both floors were heated by a wood stove in the winter. Minturn student Marion Stinson recalls: "...we’d take a big potato and put it in a coffee can, you know how coffee used to come about that high in the cans? We’d put it on the stove and cook it."

There was a window upstairs, and the rooms were equipped with desks, a blackboard, and a closet. The school outhouse changed location over the years, and at one point its runoff froze on the rocks below. A former student recalls: "Yep, and ‘course the stuff used to run right down the rocks and everything and in the wintertime we’d slide down it. We didn’t know it was pee!"

The Minturn Schoolhouse closed when the three island schools consolidated into one in 1951. By the 1960s, the schoolhouse was in disrepair and was eventually torn down.