Volunteers refurbish old Big Arm School

BIG ARM — A group of volunteers is breathing new life into a dilapidated school building.

Big Arm School had sat abandoned and boarded up for nearly a decade until a local group took a closer look at it.

“When the Big Arm Association started to look for a place to hold community events, we were told by the old-timers, ‘We used the school,’” said Alison Meslin, a member of the association.

In 2008, the Polson School District, which owns the school, gave the association a five-year renewable lease for the building, Meslin said. But before members could use it for community events, the building needed a little work.

The school was built within a couple of years of Big Arm’s establishment in 1910, Meslin said. The building was used as a school until 1952; then local residents used it as a community center until the late 1990s.

The Polson School District took ownership of the building in 1962, and in the late 1990s, the district boarded up the building, Meslin said.

Since obtaining the lease two years ago, the association has already put the building to use — but only in warm weather.

“It has some heat, no insulation, so we use it in the summer,” Meslin said. “It’s structurally sound and just a great piece of Big Arm history.”

Association members already have completed major repairs on the outside to weatherize the building, she said. This winter, they hope to finish work on the inside.

“It’s completely gutted on the inside,” Meslin said. “We’ll be insulating it, doing new wiring, hanging Sheetrock.”

When that work is finished, the volunteers will scrape off the “ugly green paint” in the building and restore the wood’s original brown stain, she said.

Association members have removed the building’s lath and badly damaged plaster, which Meslin called “a very dusty and dirty job, but done with great humor and lots [of] hard work.”

Several mouse and flicker nests also have been removed.

The group hopes to have the inside work wrapped up by spring, in time for the Montana Preservation Alliance to hold a workshop in the school on retrieving historic stories and archives, Meslin said.

Once the inside is finished, the association hopes to build an addition, Meslin said. The addition will include a kitchen and, for the first time in the building’s history, indoor restrooms.

“There is no running water, no septic system,” Meslin said.

Building the addition and wrapping up the restoration will depend on how much money the association can raise, she said.

“We’d like to think that within the next three years at least we’ll be finished with it, but I’m being very ambitious,” she said.

The association has about $6,700 to use on the interior this winter, and Meslin estimates the group has used about that much to do other work on the building over the last two years.

Most of the money comes from fundraisers, but the Big Arm Association also has won a few small grants, Meslin said.