On November 28, 1876, residents of Virginia City christened the Fourth Ward School, a new monument to education built to honor the nation’s centennial. The town was divided into wards for political and fire purposes. The majestic four-story building could accommodate over 1000 students, helping relieve serious overcrowding in the eleven other public schools. It featured state-of-the-art heating, ventilation, sanitation systems, curriculum, and teaching practices such as team-teaching. By the mid-1930s, the other eleven schools were no longer standing and fewer than 200 students attended the school. The building needed repair and seemed an obsolete relic from another era. A new brick school was built with New Deal funding, and the Fourth Ward School closed in 1936. After standing abandoned for fifty years, the structure was rescued by state, federal, and private grants, and the community reopened it in 1986 as a museum. As the last school standing of its type, it has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors, from school groups to foreign tourists, and has become a community cultural center, archives and research center, and a place to connect with people and their stories of the Old West.