Goffs Schoolhouse

Goffs, California was founded on March 19, 1883 as a station for the Southern Pacific Railway. In 1884, Atlantic and Pacific Railway operated the line through Goffs under a lease agreement with the Southern Pacific. At that time, Goffs Station consisted of a turntable and the limited structures needed for dropping off railroad cars for the delivery of freight. Goffs did not become a permanent settlement until the 1890s, when gold was discovered in the New York Mountains. By 1892, a boom in business sprang up in the area, and Goffs was the nearest railroad shipping point for the mining camp of Vanderbilt. All this activity changed the face of Goffs, and tent businesses became permanent businesses by the early 1900s. Most of the land on either side of the railroad tracks belonged to the Santa Fe Railroad by this time. In fact, there was only one plot of private land, one-hundred-sixty acres immediately north of the Santa Fe right-of-way and depot grounds. William Seibert filed a homestead entry for this property in 1998. In 1907, prominent businessman Henry Peace Ware purchased the Seibert homestead. Eventually, the Goffs Schoolhouse would be built on a portion of this land. 

The 1910 census listed fifty-eight persons in Goffs. The details of this census reflected the importance of the railroad, as forty-two of the fifty-eight persons were in Goffs because they were connected to the railroad. The fifty-eight people counted in this census also included eleven children, either school age or approaching that age. Within one year, the Santa Fe Railroad transferred some Mexican section workers to Goffs. These workers arrived with their families and settled into the small town. Soon there were enough children in Goffs to justify the construction of s school. Therefore, on December 10, 1910, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors approved a petition from the residents of Goffs, requesting that the Goffs School District be established. The District was formally incorporated in January of 1911. 

The first schoolhouse, built by Henry Peace Ware, was a typical simple wood frame structure, which the school district rented from Ware for $12.00 per month. The citizens of Goffs were proud to have a school and were not satisfied with a rented building. Their landlord also believed that the district should have a permanent building that belonged to it alone. So, in 1913, Ware donated one square acre of land to the Goffs School District. The Board of Trustees then hired San Bernardino architect Anthony Beimer and contractor William Thomas Waer to design and build the school. The Board appropriated $2,300 to complete the project. Classes commenced in the fall of 1914. The total number of students enrolled at the Goffs Schoolhouse averaged twenty-nine per year for twenty-four of the twenty-six years of the school’s existence – attendance data for the 1916-17 and 1935-36 school years are missing. One teacher supervised all the children in one room, a common instructional method for the time.  

Goffs Schoolhouse, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed December 21st 2020. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123860758.

Goffs Schoolhouse, Wikipedia . Accessed January 22nd 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goffs_Schoolhouse.