Chana School, 19th century schoolhouse in Oregon, Illinois.
Chana School is a schoolhouse in Oregon, Illinois, built in the Italianate style with a prominent bell tower and fourteen-foot ceilings throughout the structure. The interior walls are covered with decorative pressed tin panels that create a distinctive visual character in every room.
The building was constructed in 1883 as a single-room schoolhouse and expanded in 1893 with an additional classroom and bell tower. It served the community until shutting down in the early 1960s.
The school building layout shows how gender separation was practiced during that era, with three front doors - one for girls and two for boys - along with separate cloakrooms for each group. Walking through reveals how intentionally the space was divided to keep students apart in daily school life.
The restored building now operates as an educational museum where visitors can step into a rural schoolroom from the 1800s and experience how teaching and learning took place. You can walk through the original spaces to get a feel for daily school life from that period.
This is the only remaining two-room wooden schoolhouse in Illinois, with original architectural details from the 1890s still in place. The preserved wooden construction and surviving details make it a rare example of how these rural school buildings were actually built.
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