Chino's Old Schoolhouse Museum keeps the first classroom close

Chino’s Old Schoolhouse Museum is small, but it carries a long local memory. The building was the first schoolhouse built in Chino in 1888. It first stood at 5th and D Streets, then moved behind the Brick School, and later moved again to its present location.

The building did not stay only a classroom. The Eastside Thimble Club bought it in 1925 and used it as a social hall and meeting place. In 1976, the club presented it to the Chino Valley Historical Society, which opened it as a museum in 1982.

The city took ownership in 2013, cataloged archives, refurbished the inside, and reopened the museum in 2016. That chain of care is the story. A schoolhouse became a meeting hall, then a history museum, then a city-held piece of memory.

It also helps Chino feel older than its busy suburban map. Before the freeways, dairies, airport museums, and new neighborhoods, there were children walking to a one-room schoolhouse and neighbors using the same little building to gather.