About this archive

The original site

Peoria County One-Room Schools was built and maintained from 2008 by R. Bantz. It gathered district histories, teacher and pupil lists, recollections and photographs for the rural schools of Peoria County, township by township. Many pictures of abandoned schoolhouses came from the Ernest Grassel Collection, the volumes of photographs Ernest Grassel gave to the Peoria Public Library before he moved away in 1975.

The site went offline around 2014, and its pages survived in web archive snapshots.

What was restored

19 township pages, the background pages on Illinois school history and school law, 204 school districts and 370 photographs were rebuilt from those snapshots. The original wording is kept. Site menus, counters and private email addresses were removed and obvious typing slips corrected.

Each page now ends with a short note marked "Added in 2026" on what became of the districts afterwards, checked against published sources, and a few common questions. The school finder pulls every district from every township into one searchable list.

Old page addresses still work: links to the former .html pages are forwarded to their restored versions.

Credits

Research, transcriptions and most photographs belong to the original author and the families and historians who contributed them. This restoration is independent and is not run by the original author.