Post Street Archives (Post Street School)

The former Post Street School is a small, light red brick building modernized into a hybrid of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architectural features, including a renovated corner tower with a steeply hipped roof and finial and a projecting front bay with pedimented gable end, a dentiled cornice line, and multipaned, leaded-glass windows in bow-arch enframements. Once a more typical one-room school building of the day, it was the institution at which Grace A. Ball, later the wife of Herbert H. Dow, taught in 1890–1891. From 1914 to 1927, the Midland County Normal School co-occupied the building with the primary school students, and two years later it became a theater. Between 1929 and 1952, except for a hiatus during World War II, Midland's Little Theater group produced more than 120 plays in the building. After the theater moved out to larger facilities, for the next thirty years, the old schoolhouse was used as an artist's workshop. In 1987, it became the Post Street Archives, a division of the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, to house and provide research information to the general public on the records of the Dow family and their associated businesses.