Center School

ca. 1795 | 1610 Alna Road

Built in 1795, scarcely a year after Alna's incorporation as a town, the Center School is the second oldest surviving one-room schoolhouse in Maine, and one of the finest examples of Federal-style civic architecture in the region. The building was constructed on high ground at the geographic center of the new town, near the 1789 meetinghouse and the cemetery — a deliberate choice that placed the school at the heart of the farming community it served.

The school was built by either Moses Carlton or Samuel Averill, each of whom had been contracted by the town in May of 1795 to raise one schoolhouse before September for a cost not exceeding 50 pounds. It is this building — compact, clapboarded, and set on a granite and brick foundation — that survives as the sole remaining structure of the pair. ¹

The building's most distinctive feature is its open octagonal cupola, added shortly after the original construction. Topped with a bell-shaped roof and short spire, and fitted with a weathervane, the cupola gives the modest building a quiet architectural dignity that belies its utilitarian origins. Its twelve-over-eight windows, projecting cornice, and simple but refined proportions reflect a confident, post-Revolutionary era when Maine's frontier communities were developing the means — and the ambitions — to build with more care and permanence. ¹