MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – Antone “Tony” Pierucci, curator of Lake County Museums, and David Leonard, principal of Cobb Mountain Elementary School, will offer a broad scope of the challenges faced in bringing the best possible education to the children of Lake County at the Gibson Museum on  Sunday, July 17.

The presentation will take place from 3 to 5 p.m.

Pierucci has compiled photos from the collections of the Courthouse Museum in Lakeport and the Schoolhouse Museum in Lower Lake, together with prized pictures procured from other resources and informative captions, to present Lake County Schoolhouses.

Leonard will update neighbors on the challenges faced by Cobb School after 30 percent of its students and staff were burned out in the Valley fire.

He, like Superintendent Catherine Stone, had been in office only since the first of September when the fire occurred. The Leonard family home was among those destroyed.

Pierucci’s book is too rich to appropriately describe. It is hard to imagine the lives of those barefoot children posed in front of teeny one-room wood-frame schoolhouses. It astonishes with a reminder that public high schools were introduced as late as 1907.

The book, released only June 27, is among recent additions to Arcadia Publishing’s popular Images of America series, which now numbers more than 7,500 books of hyper-local history.

Three other Lake County histories are in the series: Lake County, The Pomo of Lake County, The Resorts of Lake County. Those, and Lake County Schoolhouses, may be purchased at Gibson Museum, Ely Stage Stop, Courthouse Museum and Schoolhouse Museum. The usual price is $22.

Gibson Museum & Cultural Center is located at 21267 Calistoga St. (Highway 29), directly opposite Middletown’s Community Center. For further information, call Nina Bouska at 707-987-2349.