Kline Schoolhouse

From the Cayuga Heights History Project (circa 2019)

School No. 22/Schoolhouse No. 6
(Also known as the Kline Schoolhouse)
1001 Hanshaw Road

School District No. 22
As early as 1823, residents of what would become the Village of Cayuga Heights had formed the Twenty-Second School District. Richard Manning, John Shaw, and Samuel Seaman served on the school board.

Local farm owners Jacob and Mary Cradit sold a small, triangular-shaped lot to the school district in 1823, at what is today 1001 Hanshaw Road. A schoolhouse, known formally as School No. 22 and locally as the Kline Schoolhouse, was built there at the intersection of Hanshaw and Pleasant Grove Roads (formerly known as Kline Road). In an 1866 atlas of Tompkins County, the school is labelled School House No. 6. [See map of the Town of Ithaca on page 39 of the atlas.]

Like other schoolhouses in the early 1900s, the small Kline Schoolhouse was soon to be replaced. By that time, many of the area’s farms had become part of the new suburb of Cayuga Heights, which was incorporated as a village in 1915. In January 1920, the school district changed its name to the Union Free School District No. 6. Recognizing the need for a larger school for the growing neighborhood, developer Jared T. Newman sold land for a new elementary school to the school district, and what would later become known as Hitchcock Hall opened in 1923 at 110 East Upland Road. 

The Board of Education of Union Free School District No. 6 sold the property "commonly known as the Kline schoolhouse lot" to Philip J. and Frances P. Krebs in 1941 (Deed dated May 21, 1941, Tompkins County Deed Book Number 260, Page 402). Frances worked as a clerk at Cornell University, and Philip (Cornell ’33) as an assistant manager in the Cornell Purchasing Department. The Krebs lived in the old schoolhouse for three decades. They sold the property in 1973 to Daniel and Katherine Anne Marvin, who sold it a year later to dentist H. J. Peter Patrick for use as his dental office. 

Today, evidence of the white frame building’s original use can be seen in the two doors that flank the exterior chimney—one entrance for girls, and one for boys. The schoolhouse bell remains in the office, a reminder of schooldays past.