Butler School is a historic building in Oak Brook, Illinois. Frank Osgood Butler donated the land for the two-room schoolhouse in the late 1910s. The building became a meeting place for locals, and hosted the first club to use the term "Oak Brook" to refer to the surrounding settlement. The former school was briefly used as the village hall, police station, and library, until new buildings were constructed for those purposes in the 1970s. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.HistoryThe building was constructed as a two-room schoolhouse in the early 1920s and functioned in this capacity until 1961. Frank Osgood Butler was the son of a wealthy businessman who bought a farm as a summer home in between the burgeoning suburbs of Elmhurst and Hinsdale in 1898. Butler gradually increased the size of his holdings by purchasing his neighbors' lots and businesses.It was Butler who donated a small tract of land to the city and funded the construction of a new school. The region was home to two one-story schools at the time, and Butler wanted to create an educational environment that was notable at the state level. The architect of the Georgian Style school is unknown; the style was among the most common in the interwar period for its patriot connotations. Grades one through four were taught in one classroom, while five through eight were taught in the other. A traveling music teacher visited the school once a week to teach piano. The school was originally in Consolidated School District #17 and was reassigned to Consolidated School District #53 in 1926. Butler's large holdings in the area stunted local development, and attendance was unable to significantly increase over the forty year period. An average of fifty-two students attended class each year. The school became an important place for social gatherings and hosted games, sports, and drama. A civic organization that met in the school was the first to use the term "Oak Brook" to refer to the surrounding community. The village adopted the name after it was incorporated in 1958.
