Dateline>City of Angels

Caution: The object depicted here may appear smaller in real life.

Seriously, this has got to be the world’s littlest red school house. Hardly bigger than a garden shed from Home Depot, it has room for a teacher and lectern, chalkboard, and two students. (Maybe four with classroom overcrowding.)

But don’t be fooled. This little school house didn’t actually sit on the prairie — at least not originally.

In 1927, when promoter Robert E. Callahan built the 3.5-acre Mission Village auto court in Culver City, he included the school house as one of his many tiny-town tourist attractions. When the Santa Monica Freeway plowed through the area in 1963, Callahan relocated the structure to Mint Canyon, where it did finally serve as a classroom.

The school house is now part of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society’s “Heritage Junction” collection at the William S. Hart Regional Park. The society makes no pretenses about the structure, noting that while not “architecturally significant, it does however represent small schools used in mining camps and frontier settlements during the late 19th Century in the American West.”

Since 1975, SCVHS has managed to also save a number of full-sized, historically significant buildings by moving them to its leased section of Hart’s former ranch. These include the old Saugus Train Depot (pictured left, now serving as the society’s headquarters), a company bungalow built by Edison in 1919 to house workers, and the Henry M. Newhall ranch house, which dates to the mid-1800s.

Heritage Junction is open Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m., with additional tours by appointment. For more info, visit the SCVHS website.