Eros School Building

The Eros School Building was constructed around 1935, probably by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era federal relief agency. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1992.

Eros (Marion County), located in Prairie Township in southwestern Marion County, received its first white settlers around 1854 and had a post office by the late 1880s. The community had one of the five schools in the township in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By the mid-1930s, the community received funding from one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies to build a new school. The funding likely came from the Works Progress Administration, which conducted a number of projects in the county; while the National Youth Administration (NYA) built several school buildings in the region, including one in Flippin (Marion County), the Eros School Building was not included in the NYA’s final report for Arkansas.

The Eros School Building is a rectangular structure with Craftsman-style details and a central inset porch protected by a gable roof. It is sheathed in fieldstone, a design common in WPA architecture in Arkansas, and it featured a stage in its southern wing.

The NYA approved funding for a community center for Eros, expected to cost around $5,000, in mid-1938, but the school was constructed during a period when the WPA was an active funder of such projects. A community correspondent to the Yellville (Marion County) Mountain Echo welcomed the project, writing that “we are proud of our school house that was built a few years ago, but it is too small to accommodate a large crowd. It is a veneered stone building and at present needs some repair work done.” According to the National Register nomination, “No record of the identity of the specific agency in charge [of the school’s construction] has survived.”

The Eros school district was consolidated with those in Bruno (Marion County) and Pyatt (Marion County) in 1973, and a new school was built in Eros for those students. In 2004, the Bruno-Pyatt School District was consolidated with two others to form the Ozark Mountain School District; its high school remains in Eros in the twenty-first century. The Eros School Building was unoccupied when it was added to the National Register in 1992.

For additional information:
Berry, Earl. History of Marion County. Yellville, AR: Historic Genealogical Society of Marion County, Arkansas, 2002.

“Eros Community News.” Mountain Echo, December 7, 1938, p. 4.

“Many WPA Projects in Marion County.” Mountain Echo, June 8, 1938, p. 1.

Story, Kenneth. “Eros School Building.” 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/MR0023.nr.pdf (accessed November 12, 2019).

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System