Langlade County Teachers College (Boys and Girls Club)

For almost fifty years, the men and women who taught in Langlade County’s elementary schools were trained in this building, designed by an architectural firm that specialized in designing schools of all levels. As methods for training teachers were revised, building designs changed. This building, in its design, was ideally suited for its time and purpose and eventually for other uses by other organizations. The building and its current users, the Boys and Girls Club of the Northwoods, are still an important center of community activity.

Antigo’s first school was a log cabin, built in 1879, shortly after the Deleglise family, Antigo’s founding family, moved here. Formal training of teachers did not begin until decades later when the Langlade County Teachers College was formed in 1905. At that time a prospective elementary school teacher was required to have an eighth-grade education, followed by one year of training at the teachers’ college. In the fall of 1906, 35 students enrolled in a new program taught on the second floor of the new Carnegie Library (now the museum). More stringent requirements were soon instituted; a teachers’ college enrollee needed a high school diploma and two years of classes at the teachers’ college. By 1922 the graduating class of elementary school teachers had reached 281and it became obvious that the facility was too small. A separate building was planned. (1,2)

The architectural firm of Parkinson & Dockendorf of La Crosse had been specializing in educational buildings state-wide since 1902. They constantly revised building plans as education methods evolved, while carefully considering costs to taxpayers. They designed high schools, elementary schools, middle schools, vocational schools, and teacher training schools ("Normal Schools"). Their design for the two-story building for the flat-iron lot across from the Carnegie Library was completed, at a cost of $53,440, in time for classes to begin on August 26,1926. The building is constructed of Bedford stone and contained rooms and equipment for domestic science, manual training, a library, assembly room, gymnasium and spectators’ gallery, a model school and classrooms. (2) In 1937 teacher training was expanded to a two-year course. (3)

In the 1960s many rural elementary schools consolidated and, at the same time, teacher training was revised and a four-year college degree became required. Active teachers were grandfathered in but were required to take make-up classes during summers at the Normal School. The Normal School closed in 1971.

The building then became a community center and housed the Langlade County Department on Aging. Today it is the Boys and Girls Club of the Northwoods.

(1). Robert M. Dessureau History of Langlade County Wisconsin, Berner Brothers Publishing Company, 1922. page 41

(2). Paul F. Neverman Twenty-Five Years of School House Planning, Parkinson & Dockendorff publishers, 1927.

(3). Florence Gibbins “History of the Langlade County Teachers’ College” Unpublished manuscript in Antigo/Langlade County Historical Monographs Vol. III, 1979 available at the Langlade County Historical Society Museum