legato school

July 14, 2007 at 6:45 am (architecture, landscape, Virginia) (courthouse, fairfax county, fairfax virginia, legato school, school)

The Legato School is the last of Fairfax County’s one-room schoolhouses. It has been restored and furnished as it was in the 1870s, and is operated as a museum. It was here that first to eighth grade students of western Fairfax County were taught the three Rs from 1870 until 1930. The schoolhouse was originally located at the intersection of Pender and Legato Roads. The building now sits upon the grounds of the Fairfax County Courthouse, Route 123 near Main Street, in Fairfax City, Virginia.

One elderly gentleman once described Virginia’s educational system in those impoverished times as teaching “The Three ‘Rs’ … Readin’, Writin’ and Road to Washington.” Today, Fairfax County, Virginia is one of the most affluent and educated counties of the entire United States.

In June of this year my Red Hats group were given a tour of the Fairfax County Courthouse construction site by project manager Ellen vanHully-Bronson. Parts of the courthouse were complete with carpet and finishes. Other areas were very much still a construction site. When completed the almost $100 million 316,000-square-foot expansion will more than double the size of the existing Jennings Judicial Center. The new courthouse is a five-story reinforced concrete-framed structure surrounded by a serpentine Jeffersonian brick wall. There are fourteen fitted-out courtrooms and three shells of courtrooms for future expansion, fourteen elevators, larger holding cells, a new law library, a beautiful courtyard and a state of the art security system.

Here is the slideshow: Courthouse Construction Site June 2007.

The image, Legato School, was originally uploaded by barneykin. It is posted here from Neddy’s .