The Roxbury Central School is a Tudor Revival style building that symbolizes the period of centralization in the development of New York’s educational system. Designed by Albany architect Harold O. Fullerton and built as a Public Works Administration project between 1939 and 1940, it replaced a 1913 two-story building and eight one-room rural schoolhouses. Its design reflected the village’s desire to continue the aesthetic preferences of the Gould family and to harmonize with the monumental Gothic style church built one block away in 1892. The growth and later decline of one-room and rural schools paralleled changes in state educational law, as New York State in the nineteenth century enacted laws for compulsory education, common school funding, uniform curricula, and improved educational facilities. By the 1920s, these issues and declining enrollment in many rural school districts led state educators and lawmakers to focus on centralization and consolidation. In 1938, the school obtained a P.W.A. grant of $133,650 toward a total cost of $297,0o00, hired Harold O. Fullerton to design it, and hired Rathgeb-Walsh of Port Chester, New York, to construct it. The 1913 two-story building and two houses south of it were demolished to make room for the new school. The Main Street Historic District in Roxbury still appears largely as it did when the school was completed, and a new addition expanding the school’s capacity was completed in 1997.