Quite a few people cared, in fact. Crusading seventh-graders saved the 19th-century, one-room schoolhouse from bulldozers in 1989, raising $16,500 to move it to the clearing in the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area as a temporary stop on the road to restoration.

The seventh-graders are now college graduates, but the schoolhouse was never moved to its permanent location, a lesson in the difficulties of historic preservation and the slow-moving wheels of government.

In the darkness just after midnight yesterday, the Pfeiffer's Corner School finally rode down Route 108 to a permanent home - a 22-foot-wide passenger taking up both lanes of traffic.

"Finally. Finally!" said Gary J. Arthur, the county's director of recreation and parks, who is eager to see the project finished.

Escorted by police and cheered on by local preservationists, the school made the 10-mile trip from Columbia to Rockburn Branch Park in Elkridge on a rig made up of dollies, steel beams and wood. Lacy E. Dillard, a building mover who brought the school to Route 108 all those years ago, drove it east at about 5 mph as one of his workers sat on top to watch out for low-hanging tree branches.

They had to stop and pull out the chain saws once - and in the process a telephone wire snapped - but otherwise they crept on uneventfully, followed by a caravan of park officials and interested onlookers.

"That was an impressive feat to watch, that really was," said Lisa Albrecht, taking photographs of the school her husband, Mike, soon will restore. "The little school that could - it made it."

Pat Greenwald, the seventh-graders' gifted-and-talented teacher who helped them rescue the one-room schoolhouse years ago, could not believe it when she heard the move was imminent. She is retired now.

"I had just decided that it was never going to happen, especially looking at how deteriorated the property was," said Greenwald, of Sykesville. "Nobody dreamt it was going to be so many years."

The Pfeiffer's Corner School, which preservationists believe was built in 1883, was used to educate children in eastern Howard until the 1930s, when it was sold to a private citizen and converted into a house.

In 1988, about 26 seventh-graders from Hammond Middle School in North Laurel toured the structure and were horrified to hear that it was threatened by plans for a new subdivision. They canvassed the community for donations to move the building, got it on the road the following spring and persuaded Howard's parks department to take on the project of restoring it and reopening it to the public.

The next year, they successfully campaigned the county and state to each set aside $100,000 for the work.

"We were so excited to have gotten something done in the short amount of time we did," said Lindsay McCaskill, 26, a former student who was thrust into public speaking for the first year of the project and is now an attorney in Los Angeles.

Department of Recreation and Parks officials, who acknowledged that it has taken them a while to see the project through, say they have been working steadily on behalf of the school. They searched for an appropriate site, hired an architectural historian to study the school for clues to its original condition, prepared its new home at the park and waited for more county funding.

"You know the old saying: It takes 80 percent of the effort for 20 percent of the results," said Clara Gouin, a park planner.

"It's not as simple as trying to build a brand-new building," added Ken Alban, the parks department's capital projects chief, who said the move and reconstruction will cost nearly $400,000. "You're trying to restore and save as much of an existing structure as you can. We try to do things right."

There's a lot to do.

Boards have fallen off. Some that remain are rotten. Gaping holes are all that is left of several windows and doors.

"You wouldn't let the dog live in it," said Mike Albrecht, whose Woodbine construction company will restore the school. "We're trying to save as much as we can of it, but it's been in disrepair for so many years. The good thing is, all of the exterior walls are in good shape."

He expects to start rebuilding shortly and finish before Thanksgiving.

The school's future use has not been decided, but it will be part of a complex of historical buildings. Gouin can picture people touring the building or holding community meetings there, and thinks pupils from nearby Rockburn Elementary School will visit.

That is what McCaskill wanted all along - for others to experience what she did. She remembers walking around the school with the rest of her seventh-grade group, imagining what it was like for children learning there a century before.

"That's an important part of our history," she said. "I'm happy that it will finally be put to good use, and I'm happy that we were able to step in at that critical point and save it."

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun