Jeffersonville school gets new historic marker

By FRITZ MAYER

JEFFERSONVILLE, NY — At a brief news conference on August 3, a new historical marker for the Jeffersonville Central School Building was unveiled in front of the school.

Carol Slotkin, who worked to get the building on the national registry of historic places in 1988, said that the effort to preserve the area’s heritage must be constant if important landmarks, such as the school, are to be maintained for future generations.

She said her initial effort to get the school listed on the national and state registries, and thus protected from destruction and alteration, was launched in part in reaction to a school administration official, who at the time suggested it would be cheaper to knock down the school’s brick chimneys rather than have the bricks re-pointed. The stately slate-roofed building is now used as an elementary school.

Jack Costello, the president of Jeffersonville Enhances More of Sullivan (JEMS), the organization that provided the money for the marker, said the school was modeled after the governor’s palace in Williamsburg, VA.

Barbara Hahn, a past president of JEMS, and a student in the third, first-grade class at the school, said it was built for $417,500 in 1938 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. She said it took longer to collect the money for the sign than it took the 100 original workmen to build the school nearly 70 years ago.

Also on hand were Jeffersonville Mayor Ed Justice and interim Sullivan West school board president Rick Sandler.