The owner of the Sterling Schoolhouse Antiques building plans to replace it with a new two-story office building.
Mike Cherok said his family will give away the former two-room schoolhouse, which was built in 1879. "I'd like to preserve the schoolhouse," he said, in a telephone interview last week. "Somebody might appreciate having it somewhere else."
He said his family will use the donation as a tax deduction. The one-story building is about 900 square feet. "We've never connected the sewer or water, so it should not be much of a problem moving it," he said. If no one expresses interest in the next 18 months, the family will demolish the building, he added.
Cherok said leasing the historic building is no longer an option. "They've raised the taxes so much I can't get enough money out of the leases there," he said.
Replacing it with a professional office building would be economically feasible, he added.
During the interim, a business is interested in using the property to park cars.
Betty Geoffroy, who has been leasing the space for 27 years, is retiring and closing her antique business. She said the county called the school "Guilford Elementary" and operated it until the Sterling Annex was built on Church Road, which intersects with Ruritan Circle. A hallway for children to hang their jackets divided the two rooms and an outhouse was placed in the backyard. It's still there, overgrown with weeds.
The county sold the building to H.F. Kenne on Nov. 20, 1947, for $3,100. A family later rented or bought the building and partitioned it off into additional rooms, Geoffroy said.
On Jan. 16, 1980, Geoffroy, Hugh Ball and Bonnie Hayman leased the building and called their business "Sterling Schoolhouse Antiques."
Ball had actually attended the school before it closed and his mother, the late Peggy Testerman, was a teacher there.
Two years later, Ball and Hayman moved onto their full-time jobs, and Geoffroy became sole proprietor. She is closing the business, because she is retiring.
"This is what I dreamed of doing when I retired," Geoffroy said, chuckling. "Isn't that something?"