Go down the “Drive” until you come to the Osseo Road and turn north. Go down approximately two or three miles, cross the border of Brooklyn Center and you will find a pretty little brick building which used to be Twin Lake School. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t say little, for a country school, when most of them were half that size. It was modern looking for its age, probably being built in the ‘20s, and the red bricks gave it a bright clean look.
You entered the school on the west side. Go up some stairs and you come to the classrooms. Go down the stairs and you find the auditorium, with a stage and
many long picnic-like tables where the students ate their lunch.
Some place in the school was a secret, but where? Was it in one of the three classrooms, or in the fourth room, which was for manual training for the boys and home ec for the girls? Could the secret be hidden in a birdhouse that one of the boys built or under a pile of gingham that the girls fashioned into aprons?
There was a classroom for each of the three teachers, the first for Miss Adams who taught grades 1 to 3, the next for Miss Fawn Homman who taught grades 4 to 6, and the last for the Principal, Mrs. Sarah Brown, who taught grades 7 and 8. Did these teachers hide the secret in their desks, to be found at a later time? Or was this secret tucked away in the lunchroom downstairs?
The stage could have been a fine place to stash a secret! Who would look underneath? The kids put on plays on that stage or a tap-dancing class was taught there, courtesy of the WPA. Other parties were held in that auditorium such as the popular “bean feed,” in which Mrs. Houchkins, the school cook, whipped up tons of baked beans and brown bread to feed a large group of parents. Or the Bunco Party, once a year, brought in a large number of parents who liked small gambling.
That secret could have been hidden anywhere in that auditorium/lunchroom!
Well, I hope you have it figured out by now. It wasn’t inside at all — it was outside! The secret was that sometime in the ‘30s, Principal Brown had the janitor take a few bricks out of the south-west corner of the building and insert a time capsule inside the wall. It had information about the school and teachers, photos of students and teachers, notes from all us kids, etc. It was put there so that whenever the building was torn down, someone would find all the history of the school.
Now, many years have gone by and the building still stands! Who will ever find the secrets within?
Note: The building today has a different purpose.