PRESTON – Alexis Beckstead has been the chairman of the Oneida Stake Academy Foundation since 2021 and member of the board since 2017. She has the daunting task of trying to finish a 21-year effort to save the building.
The original building was completed in 1895 after five years of labor by the settlers of Franklin County. It was once part of the Preston High School Campus, but was moved to Benson Park in 2003.
Beckstead recently finished a nearly 440-page book about the 137-year old school building and the Academy system of education.
“There are hundreds of photos that cover the years the Academy was in operation,” she said. ”When the (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) members in this area were told to organize an academy in 1888 they started work on the academy by 1890, but they started teaching before the building was even started.”
The teaching started in Franklin then moved to Preston. For a while the classes were held in a furniture store on Main Street. Then it was held in the basement of the academy when it was finished. Students filled the classrooms as soon as the construction on the entire building was complete.
“The Oneida Stake Academy book sells for $50, that is at cost,” Beckstead said. “We wanted people to know the importance of the building. We have an index in the back of the book so people could find their connection to the building. We tried to list of all the students we could find.”
“They had a hard time getting the boys on the farm to come to the academy,” Beckstead added. “It wasn’t until the Nelson gym was built that the boys started to attend the school more consistently.
“Work on the academy is moving along. We have received a boost in individual donations from the sale of the book,” she continued. “And the Larry H. Miller Foundation, the George S. and Dolores Eccles Foundation, Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation and other local businesses have helped us a lot.”
Beckstead said it will be a beautiful building for the community to enjoy when it is completed and be a place to hold community events.
“To finish the building we need framing outside, electricity, plumbing. When those thing are completed it will easier to get the elevator attached to the building,” she said. “It’s exciting; we can see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
One of the impressive things about the Oneida Stake Academy is the people who graduated from there. Two presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints graduated from there: Harold B. Lee in 1916 and Ezra Taft Benson in 1918.
“Besides those two church leaders there have been other amazing people that graduated from the Academy. One was the president of Boeing Airlines, and another went to U.S. Steel,” Beckstead said. “Some were department heads in colleges and universities.”
The Church of Jesus Christ said they operated academies between the 1870s and 1930s, as secondary schools. The schools supplied primarily adolescent Latter-day Saints with weekday education after grade school and before college.
After public high schools became more common in the United States, the church closed or sold most of its academies to the states where they were located.