About Us

History of this School

Established as Belleview District # 68 teaching school in
1879. A purchase contract was found dated November 1881
for the land where Belleview once sat. A temporary school
of some kind was built in 1878. Then the summer or fall of
1894 the schoolhouse we know know as Belleview School
District # 68 was built. It was given the name Belleview at
the Annual meeting in 1896.
The first class of the District was 16 boys and 9 girls. It was
typical to have students any where from 5 years old to
students in their
early 20s. It was used as a school until April of 1956. Then
it was sold to the Caldwell Township for $1 to be used as a
polling place till 1998. After that it was subsequently
abandoned until September 2009. Mike and Valerie
Brunhoeber felt sorry for the neat old building and moved it
to their farm where it currently is maintained.

A school district law was established so that the pupils did
not have to walk or ride to school more then 3
miles.

A little about the Caldwell Township and its early one
room schools...

To the right you have a map of the Caldwell Township in 1901
The schoolhouses are labeled in red:

Going clockwise around the map, staring in the northwest corner is
"Knowledge Hill" (Which is the school in section 8 and was later
moved and is now what is known as "Knowledge Hill" today),
"Spring valley" (Gone forever), "Greenman" (now a house in town),
Caldwell school (one room school used by fair board), Brown
School (Gone forever), Belleview (SAVED FOREVER!!).

The neat thing about Belleview is it is one of the rear schools still
left today that was built before the 1900s! Again we are estimating
it was built around 1882 because we have located a copy of the
contract when the land was first purchased from folks by the name
of William and Emma Dimke. You can see the name "W. Dimke"
name on this map at the original site! I'm not sure how often the
maps were updated back then but the transaction was made for
the one acre property which was purchased for 10.00 back in
November of 1881.
We will be digging deeper and deeper into the history of this
school for years! It can be a struggle because they just didn't keep
much record of the building after it was a school. The latest school
record we have is 1951 and it is even missing the page that tells
what the student's names were. We hope to find time to go to the
Wellington library to look through the old newspapers soon!