Vanished Rochester: Hubbell School

Hubbell School ca. 1957 (Courtesy of Swords Family Archive)

Long vanished from the Rochester Hills landscape is the Hubbell school house, which stood on the south side of what is today known as Walton Boulevard, near the southeast corner of Walton & Adams.  In the days when Rochester Hills was the rural township of Avon, it was served by not one, but several small school districts.  The Walton & Adams area was known as Avon Township School District #8, or the Hubbell district.  The school district took its name from  pioneer settler Samuel Hubbell, who had purchased the land in that area from the government in 1824. The exact date that the Hubbell school house was built is not known, but the 1872 plat map of Avon Township shows a school house at that location, in the corner of what was by that time known as the Lomason farm.  The Hubbell district existed until 1948, at which time the property owners in the area petitioned that their rural district be dissolved and annexed to the larger Rochester school district.  The reason for their request was that few of the property owners actually resided in the district - they were mostly real estate investors and speculators - and therefore felt ill-qualified to serve as trustees of the Hubbell school. After Hubbell was consolidated with Rochester in 1948, the Rochester school district continued to operate the Hubbell school as an elementary building for a couple of years.  By 1957, Meadow Brook Elementary had been built to serve the children of the area and one room schools like Hubbell were rendered obsolete.  The photo above shows what the building looked like when it being used as a real estate office around 1957. At that time, the Howard Keating real estate company was developing the Spring Hill subdivision at the southeast corner of Walton & Adams.  Those who remember the Hubbell school tell me that it stood approximately where the McDonald's restaurant is located today.

My thanks to the custodians of the Swords Family Archive for lending me this photo of the Hubbell School.