Kola Kole eyesore to be demolished

The wood-slat building in shambles behind the schoolhouse at Kingston’s Kola Kole Park has thick moss and blue tarps covering its deteriorated rooftop. The framing and foundation are rotten and disintegrating. It’s an eyesore and hazard that Kitsap County is finally getting rid of.

The building will be demolished this month, carried away and cleaned up clear down to the dirt, according to Paul McCoy, building maintenance supervisor for the county’s Facilities, Parks and Recreation Department.

A small amount of asbestos was found in the chimney mortar, he said, which will be removed before DMSL Construction of Arlington demolishes the building.

Most recently, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous have used the building as a meeting place the last decade.

“It’s a very old building,” McCoy said. “It was just getting them by. We had an opportunity for them to get another area that was better suited for them.” The groups are now meeting at the Kingston Community Center.

The building was constructed in the early 1940s, used by the Kingston Grade School as a cafeteria, place to watch movies, and later as a wood shed, shop and home to Kingston’s first library, according to Kingston native Jack Minert. His mother, Maxine, was a teacher at the Kingston Grade School.

“They should have torn that building down 20 years ago,” he said.

Lucille Weisenberger, who also grew up in Kingston, attended the grade school for eight years in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The cafeteria wasn’t built yet but after teaching school in Poulsbo during the 1940s, she returned to Kingston in1949 where she taught at the grade school until it moved to David Wolfle Elementary.

She remembers taking her students to the cafeteria to watch films as it was the darkest room they had. Weisenberger spent 15 more years teaching at Wolfle Elementary then became the school’s librarian for another 15 years.

The Kingston library moved from the cafeteria building to one of the first-story classrooms in the old school after students were moved to Wolfle before settling into its current location across the street in the Kingston Community Center, Minert said.

The school house in Kola Kole park was built in 1909 replacing a one-room school built in 1895 on the site now occupied by the community center. The school moved in 1951 when Wolfle Elementary opened, a brick building situated closer to Highway 104 than the current building, which opened in 1990, Weisenberger recalled.

The schoolhouse in Kola Kole Park now houses the Kingston Cooperative Preschool in the lower two classrooms. The North Kitsap Boys & Girls Club, which runs its programs out of the Kingston Junior High, wants to lease the two upper-story classrooms and renovate them to use until a new community center is built in the Village Green.

The county has no plans to build any other structures on the site of the cafeteria building once it’s gone, McCoy said, but does hope to replace windows and paint the top floor of the school house.

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