In honour of Ontario Heritage Week, InnisfilToday will be sharing a series of stories from the Innisfil Heritage Committee on the town's early villages and settlements
This week the Innisfil Heritage Advisory Committee has been highlighting our one-room schools and offering them as examples of how ‘adaptive reuse’ has been utilized to repurpose a building from its original use to meet modern functions.
The last school in our series is the former Knock School (S.S. No. 15), which is one of seven properties in Innisfil which has been designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act as a place of cultural heritage value or interest to the municipality.
The Knock School is the only one-room schoolhouse in Innisfil that is essentially in its original classroom state and is an excellent example of late 19th / early 20th century Ontario schoolhouse design featuring a high-pitched gable and bell tower and a front entranceway with separate doors for boys and girls as was the practice at the time of the building’s construction.
The first school, built in 1871, was a log and frame building which was later replaced in 1902 by the brick school that stands today. The school remained a place of learning until it was closed in 1965. Rather than being lost to history, members of the Knock community purchased the building from the school board for use as a community centre where it continued as a cherished focal point for a variety of family and community events and gatherings for a number of years and its adjacent ball diamond popular with local minor baseball teams. Since the 1970s, the Knock School has been home to the Innisfil Historical Society who uses it as a meeting place, a repository for historical documents and photographs, and a location for various popular educational activities and events that have showcased the earlier days of Innisfil.
Owned by the Town since 2002, it underwent a major heritage restoration project in 2007 which addressed significant deficiencies to both the inside and outside of the building while maintaining the heritage attributes of the site. Today Knock School remains a popular community centre available for a variety of uses and stands proudly as a landmark on the busy 10 Sideroad.
