House (District School No. 7)

This one-story, wood-frame building with a mansard-roofed belfry cupola represents the stylish one-room district schools built in the later nineteenth century. Here it marks Lincoln's high point as a lumbering and wood-products manufacturing center. Unlike the simple gabled boxes of the early nineteenth century, this clapboarded school has a steep slate roof, an ornate door hood over its central entrance, and paneled pilasters at its corners. It is the most stylish building in the village and dates from the time the population of Lincoln reached its peak when its residents were harvesting the Green Mountain forests and working in the town's fifteen mills. In 1880, with 285 school-age children out of 1,368 residents, the town replaced all of its district schools during the next decade. By 1910 the timber harvest was dwindling and the population declined by one-third. None theless, the school was improved with a bank of windows added to the west wall to conform with a state law in 1904 requiring better light in classrooms. This feature is common to one-room schools that remained in use in the twentieth century. A combination woodshed and privy, typical of many district schools, stands behind the former school, which is now a private residence.