Time Was . . . : Children Celebrate Centennial of ‘Pumpkinville’ Schoolhouse

Kindergarteners at West Orange Elementary School burst into applause after Principal Mary Elaine Kunz described the tiered birthday cake baked to celebrate the 100th birthday of their school tonight.

“They don’t have a sense of history at this age,” said kindergarten teacher Ramona Kemp-Blair, “but they love birthday parties.”

Some of the 600 West Orange students will join former staff and alumni for tonight’s birthday bash and old-fashioned ice cream social at the oldest school in the city.

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, a 1966 graduate of West Orange, will deliver the evening’s keynote speech.

“I delivered my first speech ever before a public audience as a fifth-grader at West Orange,” said Vasquez, who went on to speak at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

“I’m sure my parents never envisioned at the time that I would go from making a speech in front of that little flagpole to a speech at the Republican National Convention,” he said. “But I’m glad it all started there and I’m glad the school is still there.”

Just two years after the city incorporated in 1888, West Orange opened as a one-room wooden schoolhouse in an area referred to by some as “Pumpkinville,” said local historian Phil Brigandi, who has written an account of the school.

Originally at the corner of Flower and La Veta, the school was built after farmers on the west side of town threatened to form their own school district, complaining that the school in town was too far and the walk too dangerous.

But the first West Orange Elementary, with its separate entrances for boys and girls, closed in 1905 due to a lack of students. It was reincarnated in 1924 as a six-room brick building on Almond Street, close to where the current school stands, Brigandi said.

All that’s left of the 1924 building are the bricks that form a planter out front, salvaged from a junk company, he said.

This week, Kunz toured classrooms dressed in a turn-of-the-century schoolteacher’s costume to help bring the school’s history to life.

“The most important thing is that West Orange doesn’t stop at 100 years,” Kunz told a group of fourth- and fifth-graders. “We keep going because this is our school. Right?”