The Village of Lewis began to be developed in 1818, and one of its first buildings was the Lewis Hotel, owned and operated by David Sykes, at the corner where Route 9 meets Fox Run Road until it burned down on October 1, 1961. The village soon included a store, dwelling house, barn, and school house. Behind the hotel stood Lewis Central District School 2, which served children from a three-mile radius. Surrounded on three sides by the cemetery, it had no room for play, so students used the Kendall property opposite the school, where there was a field and barn. In 1887, the Central School became the second school built in Lewis. It was a one-room school until 1895, when an addition created two rooms, a smaller one for the first four grades and a larger one for the higher grades. Around 1922, further improvements added two shared flush toilets and sinks, and on Mondays students received paper cups for the week to drink water from the sinks. In 1937, the school centralized to Elizabethtown Lewis Central School.