WALKING TO SCHOOL IN A SNOWSTORM, BELIEVE IT?
by Dave Ponke

For years, Stone Road was by far the most heavily traveled route, one that connected Algonac with the village of Fair Haven.

Back in the 1860s, a man named Thomas Folkerts purchased land along Stone Road. Mr. Folkerts eventually deeded a portion of this land to be used specifically for a school to be built upon. It was built by the mid-1920s. All of the area children attended the much-awaited facility.

Eventually named the Swartout School, records show that it was one of the first schools in St. Clair County to become a standardized school.

By the mid 1880s, Swartout School had a pair of teachers that handled the duties of educating the area children. By 1952, the school became part of the Algonac Community School District, and children began riding on buses to school from Fair Haven.

The former Pointe Tremble School was originally a simple one-room building, on the corner of Ainsworth and Pointe Tremble Road (Highway M-29). It held a potbelly stove in its center, to keep the children warm during class in the winter season. Children would walk home often along the path of the Detroit Interurban Railway, towards the St. John’s Marshland. Trees and vegetation cover the most of the mostly-gone railbed today.

Times sure have changed over the years; now, students often own their first vehicle by their sophomore year. Holding a job after school and making extra money helps them pay for the necessary cost of owning such transportation, which includes gas and auto insurance.

Schoolyard games years ago included the traditional ball tossing, jump rope, playing on a swing, marbles, hide and seek and ring around the rosie. Today, those games certainly are part of the playground frolics, too. And, children have created other activities, games they have made up amongst themselves to be sure. (“If” some leave their I-Pod and hand-held DVDs at home with the cell phone!)

And the playground itself today would look foreign to an observer from a century ago: shredded rubber on the ground as a cushion to falls, complex monkey bars, slides that stand upwards of 15 feet and more…times sure have changed the look of the playground landscape over the years!

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Did you, or perhaps your grandparents, walk to school “everyday, five miles each way, often in knee-deep snow and blinding winds?”

Surely we have heard the stories, and stories they just might be.

But people can often dish up a wonderful serving of fine lines, enough to captivate the mind and capture the spirit, wouldn’t you say?

• • • • •

Many may think that the Chris Craft Boat Company, founded in Algonac, was perhaps the only such company years ago. But that is far from the truth.

The Mariner Boat Company started building boats around 1952, at the old Conley Roller Rink on Roberts Road off M-29, north of Algonac.

Mariner Boats built boats that were open, utility-type crafts, with inboard engines. Owner Edward Kaunitz actually bought out Gar Woods’s designs when Wood left the business. Mariner Boats was in operation there for about 15 years.