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A Bit of History
Garberville’s finest building was designed by one of Eureka’s best-known architects, Franklin Thompson Georgeson (1889-1953). His work still standing includes the Minor Theater, the First Presbyterian Church and the old Creamery in Arcata, The Bank of Loleta in Loleta, and the Eureka Inn, the Masonic Temple, the Eureka Women’s Club, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, and many fine private homes and commercial buildings in Eureka. His commissions span the North Coast from Crescent City to San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition.
Our Garberville school was completed in 1939, in the last years of the Depression. It embodies the solid civic confidence so characteristic of Roosevelt’s public works. Built in California’s Mission style of architecture—which is ironic, since the closest real missions were built almost 200 miles south of us, in very different natural and social environments—this quirk makes the building all the more representative of government’s abiding quest (until our times) to bring us together with symbols and structures that create for us—indeed, impose—a common history. Whatever we think of this history, this building helps us to see it, and if preserved and used in part as a local museum, it can help us better to share and learn from our local history.
Thirty years of students went through the Garberville school before it became the District Office Building. Traditions include fearing the ghost of the first principal, Miss.Clemens, memories of WWII Quonset huts built on the fields behind the school, and later, many wonderful performances at the Redwood Players Theater in the former gym/cafeteria.
Please share your
memories with us and we’ll put them here for
everyone to enjoy.
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