Pat Moran was a nursery school student at Pine Grove Schoolhouse in the 1950s, small enough that the building's single room felt enormous. This summer, she's one of the people paying to repaint it.
That is not a coincidence, and it is not sentiment dressed up as news. It is the actual mechanism by which a wooden one-room schoolhouse built for $1,538.34 has survived on West Avon Road for a century and a half. The building does not get preserved by an anonymous town budget line. It gets preserved by the specific handful of people who once sat in it, and who keep showing up, decade after decade, to keep it standing.
What's happening at 3 Harris Road right now
The Avon Historical Society closed the 1865 Pine Grove Schoolhouse to visitors for all of July and August this year for a three-part renovation: interior repainting, a repair to the schoolhouse's original 19th-century chalkboard pulley system, and patching several small holes in the roof. The painting work started August 5 and was expected to take up to two weeks, which puts the schoolhouse on track to reopen sometime this September, timed to a public open house that will double as a reintroduction of the building after the closure.
The paint itself is a small detail worth sitting with. It's being donated by Farrow & Ball, the British manufacturer known for the kind of richly pigmented, historically accurate colors used in restoration work worldwide. A schoolhouse that cost less than $1,540 to build in 1865 is being finished this year with paint from a brand whose name shows up in design magazines. Nobody involved seems to think that's ironic. It's just what it takes to do the job properly, and Thomas Mach Interiors of Simsbury donated the consultation and project management to make sure it was done that way.
The same circle, fifty years apart
The building's last major upgrade was in 1976, when the Avon Historical Society restored it as a Bicentennial project. Society President Terri Wilson has said the renovation is timed on purpose, calling it a way to honor "America's 250" through the schoolhouse itself.
What that framing leaves out, and what makes this renovation different from a routine maintenance cycle, is who's funding the labor. Alongside proceeds from the Society's 2026 Tablescapes fundraiser, the work is being paid for by Pat Moran, in memory of her mother Harriet Moran, and by Delmonte and Martha Davis of New York City. Martha Davis's mother, Arline Judd Olson, was the oldest surviving pupil of Pine Grove Schoolhouse before she died in 2016 at the age of 100.
That is two donors with a direct, personal, decades-old connection to the actual desks inside the building, funding a renovation that happens to fall exactly fifty years after the last one. The building isn't just old. It's been kept alive by people who were physically present in it as children, which is a much rarer form of preservation than most historic sites get.
What comes out of the box in September
The most concrete reason to actually go this fall: the September open house will include the reopening of a time capsule sealed during the schoolhouse's 1976 renovation. Fifty years is long enough that almost nobody currently living in Avon watched it get sealed, and long enough that whatever's inside will read less like nostalgia and more like a message that was addressed, on purpose, to this exact year.
Beyond the capsule, the open house is described as including a range of activities, giveaways, and photography documenting the continuing renovation. It is, in effect, the schoolhouse's reintroduction to the town after two months behind scaffolding and drop cloths.
A building from a system that's mostly gone
At one point, the United States had roughly 190,000 one-room schoolhouses. Avon alone had seven of them. Pine Grove is the one still furnished, staffed by volunteer greeters, and open to the public on Sunday afternoons, which puts it in a genuinely small category of buildings from a schooling system that mostly no longer exists anywhere in the country.
The schoolhouse operated for 84 years before closing in 1949, then quietly picked up second careers as a branch library, a nursery school, and a meeting place for Explorer Scouts, all before the Historical Society's 1976 Bicentennial restoration turned it into the small museum it is today. Henry Barnard, Connecticut's first Commissioner of Education, apparently thought highly of the place even in its working years. The Historical Society still repeats his assessment of it:
"The finest school in the state."
It is on both the National and State Register of Historic Places, and it sits inside the Pine Grove Historic District, a small pocket of West Avon that includes five other homes built before 1865. None of that status protects it automatically. It still needed a roof patch and a repaint in 2026, and it still needed specific residents willing to write checks to make that happen.
If you want to see it
The schoolhouse is at 3 Harris Road, at the corner of West Avon Road, Route 167. In a normal year it's open to the public Sunday afternoons from 1 to 4 p.m., June through September, with volunteer greeters from the Historical Society on hand. This year, with the July and August closure, the September open house is effectively the season's reopening.
If Pine Grove Schoolhouse is the kind of thing you want to follow further, the Avon Historical Society, founded in 1974, also maintains three other sites worth knowing about: the Avon History Museum on East Main Street, the Derrin House on West Avon Road, and the Horse Guards Barn. Together they're the closest thing Avon has to a running record of what the town looked like before it was the town most residents know now.
None of that record keeps itself. It gets kept by people like Pat Moran and the Davis family, one donation and one renovation at a time, which is worth remembering the next time someone tells you a place like this just happens to still be here.
Details about hours, the open house date, and how to volunteer as a greeter are posted directly by the Avon Historical Society, and the renovation itself was first announced through a public release in early August.
If a story like this is part of why you love living in Avon, that same attention to what makes a place worth staying in is exactly what shapes how Christina Muller works with buyers and sellers across the Farmington Valley. When the time comes to think seriously about your own next move here, schedule a free consultation to talk it through.
