Built in 1911, the Daniels School stands at the intersection of US Highway 60 and Weld County Road 25 in Milliken. As some of the only surviving brick schoolhouses in the state, the school and its teacherage served the educational needs of the area for nearly a half-century, closing in the late 1950s. After being listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2006, the structure was extensively renovated in 2012 and now welcomes visitors.
James Daniels originally came to Milliken during the Civil War. Born in Gloucester, England, in 1838, Daniels sailed for the Americas in 1857, spending several years in Canada, Wisconsin, and Kansas. In 1859 he walked from Kansas to Denver to join the Colorado Gold Rush. A relatively successful prospector in Clear Creek and Russell Gulch, he ended up as one of the original miners in the famed Buckskin Joe Mines by 1861.
Daniels soon left the mines to settle in present-day Milliken, just outside the city of Hillsboro. He started a dairy farm in 1861 and filed an official claim under the Homestead Act in 1863. To serve the growing population in the area, School District #21 was established in 1873, and a temporary wooden schoolhouse was constructed at the eventual site of the Daniels School, where James Daniels had donated the land for the new building in 1879. Milliken incorporated in the early 1900s, built around a commercial rail line between Denver and Laramie. In 1910 the town officially “opened” by holding municipal elections and digging a municipal well. After briefly owning a saloon, Daniels funded the construction of a brick schoolhouse in 1911.
Although Daniels served as director of the school for a short time, the school was actually named for his brother Henry Daniels, another prominent settler in the Big Thompson Valley. Built in the Classical Revival architectural style, the Daniels schoolhouse is a single-story structure featuring a pedimented, full-front porch with four prominent Tuscan columns. Constructed of red brick, the Daniels schoolhouse has decorative quoins of beige sandstone and a spired bell tower on the roofline’s center. The school stands on a one acre lot and faces Highway 60. Another one-story wood frame building, initially used as housing for the school’s teachers (known as a “teacherage”), stands to the west of the main school building.
Description and Additions
The school building’s most distinctive feature remains its prominent porch and its five concrete steps. The building’s pediment is supported by four Tuscan pillars and two Tuscan pilasters. The pediment bears the inscriptions, “1911” and “School Dist. 21.” Historic photos of the school show that it originally had a balustrade running between the porch’s columns, but this feature is now missing entirely. The school has a hipped roof with a wooden frieze under its eaves and asphalt shingles. The bell tower originally featured a hipped roof with wooden shingles, but was ravaged by time, weather, and neglect, resulting in most of the shingles being replaced in 2012. The schoolhouse also features a wooden, hipped-roof storage addition on its northwest side, built shortly after the brick main building. The school’s front doors open into a vestibule that leads into the old classroom facility. The classroom could be subdivided into two smaller spaces via a counter-weighted pull-down partition.
The teacherage stands 100 feet west of the main school building and is a rectangular wooden building standing atop a concrete foundation. The teacherage is clad in wooden drop siding and boasts its original cornerboards. The interior’s layout is simple, consisting of two small rooms and an even smaller kitchen.
Originally, the school had two brick two-seat privies, but these were torn down in the mid-1930s to be replaced by two wood-frame, two-seat privies built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Only one of these WPA privies remains on-site; the other was taken to a private residence during the 1970s. On October 19, 1959, the Daniels School was dissolved amid a consolidation of several schools in Johnstown and Milliken to form the new District RE-5J. The Boy Scouts of America continued to use the schoolhouse for events throughout the 1970s, and from the 1980s through 2010 the site was used for storage by its owners.
In 2005 the Daniels School was listed in the National Register of Historic Places for contributions to the broader field of education history, serving the needs of its surrounding agricultural communities for more than fifty years. It is also an unusual yet distinctive example of the Classical Revival architectural style. Despite its prominent Classical Revival styling, the Daniels School retains many typical features of rural schoolhouses, namely its bell tower, single classroom, and narrow, double-hung windows. An important historical resource for Weld County, the Daniels School is the only remaining brick schoolhouse in the county and one of a limited number of sites with a surviving teacherage nationwide.