Alco School

The Alco School, located on State Highway 66 at Alco (Stone County), is a one-story, fieldstone-clad building constructed in 1938 by the National Youth Administration (NYA), a Depression-era federal relief agency. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1992.

Alco is located about fourteen miles west of the county seat, Mountain View (Stone County). A post office was established at Alco in 1878, and the unincorporated community had sufficient population to support a school. While no information about previous school buildings is available, local residents were able to get a new building in 1938 through the NYA, which provided jobs for young people during the Depression. The Alco School was one of about a dozen NYA projects in Stone County during 1938–1939, which also included construction of a one-room schoolhouse at Younger; repairs to schools at Mossey Ridge, Oak Grove, Rushing, and Sunnyland; and a new roof for the Stone County Courthouse in Mountain View.

The resulting building at Alco was a rectangular, fieldstone-covered structure distinguished by a parapeted entrance porch and a pair of louvered eyebrow dormers on the roof, though the latter were apparently lost when the original composition-shingle roof was replaced with a metal roof. A plaque on the building is inscribed “Built in cooperation with the Alco School District. School board members were A. M. Lawrence – President, C. E. Ward – Secretary and J. R. Gilbert.”

Grades 1–5 met in the building’s north room and grades 6–9 in the south room. The Alco School served local students for about twelve years until a new school district, Stone County School District No. 1, was established in 1949, and Alco students were sent to school in Timbo (Stone County). That district was in turn consolidated with the Mountain View School District in 2004.

The Alco school building later became a private residence.

For additional information:
“A History of the National Youth Administration in Arkansas, Jun 26 – 1935 – July 3, 1943.” Kansas City, MO: War Manpower Commission, ca. 1943.

State Advisory Committee. “The National Youth Administration/State of Arkansas/Fiscal Report 1938–1939.”

Story, Kenneth. “Alco School.” National Register of Historic Places registration form. On file at Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Little Rock, Arkansas. Online at http://www.arkansaspreservation.com/National-Register-Listings/PDF/ST0277.nr.pdf (accessed June 15, 2020).

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System