Franklin couple’s popular school-to-home renovation uses quirky history

When Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson decided to buy their first home, they wanted one with a past. To their delight, they found a former elementary school with enough lives to rival a cat.

Over the course of its 110 years, the Union Joint Graded School No. 9 in Franklin has served as an illustrious educational facility, a repository for apples, a barn that housed turkeys, a haunt for an “old-maid schoolteacher” ghost, and a residence that delighted the community with abundant Christmas decorations.

The latest owners, who moved into the old school in September, have wrapped this history into a life-defining project to renovate the building into their dream home. Grissom and Wilson — a communications specialist and orthopedic surgeon, respectively — have documented the transformation via YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, amassing more than 2 million followers among the platforms.

The couple’s efforts, Grissom says, prove that even those who aren’t contractors can learn enough to undertake the challenges of what she describes as building a house inside the shell of a brick structure. The result is a private home that serves the family of four while paying homage to the old Johnson County school’s multiple lives and the people who have passed through it.

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‘The weirdest (old house) we could think of’

For Grissom, Union Joint was first a monument among the cornfields — a building she would glimpse as a child when her family drove from Franklin to Sweetwater and Cordry Lakes for weekend trips.

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“I’d always be, like, peeping out the window trying to see inside because I just thought it was so cool that someone got to live there,” said Grissom, 36.

She and Wilson, 35, both attended Hopewell Elementary School in Franklin. At first, he was simply the brother of Grissom’s friends, but the two began dating while at Franklin Community High School. They would pass the house as they drove to cross country meets at Hoosier Horse Park.

After college, they both moved to New York City, where they lived in a series of small apartments. The couple married in 2015. She worked for the startup dog toy subscription service BarkBox, managing public relations, content and social media. He attended medical school and did a residency in orthopedic surgery.

By 2021, with the pandemic still raging and a newborn baby, Wilson and Grissom decided to move back to Johnson County to be closer to their families. A real estate agent friend sent them an email with the old school’s listing under the subject line “Dont Judge me.” And the couple did not.

“We just always wanted an old weird house. This was the weirdest one we could think of in the area,” Grissom said with a laugh.

Her parents and sister took a look inside the old school, and in August 2021, Grissom and Wilson bought it site unseen for $175,000.

Old school buildings across the state have similar second lives as residences, offices, retail stores or lodge meeting spaces, said Mark Dollase, vice president of preservation services at Indiana Landmarks. About a dozen such buildings remain in Johnson County, according to the organization.

“Rather than just being left to rot and then get demolished, (what) the couple that have recently moved in have done is sort of continued that tradition of adaptive reuse of a building that was perfectly good and solid — it just needed to be updated,” Dollase said.

As the duo began renovations, they found themselves following in the footsteps of the family who had first made the schoolhouse into a home.

‘You’d have to be crazy to take it on’

Union Joint’s journey as a residence began in 1956, when Dorothy and Charles Graves moved into the building. Twenty years had passed since it had been used as a school, but Dorothy still remembered those days well. As a student there from the fourth through eighth grades, she played tag, ring-around-the-rosy and other games that used the maypole in the schoolyard.

Union Joint was built in 1914 as the first joint township graded school in Johnson County, according to a January 1915 Indianapolis News story. Before World War I, the Indiana General Assembly had passed legislation to consolidate one-room schools, Dollase said. Union Joint’s location made the school more accessible to students who lived far from Franklin and Nineveh townships’ centers.

The school served grades one through eight in four classrooms, and almost 100 students were enrolled by 1935. But around that year, the townships decided to close Union Joint to further consolidate and save money, according to newspaper archives. Over the next few decades, a farmer and then his nephew owned the building, using it for apple storage and as a barn where turkeys, cows, chickens and pigs lived, Grissom said.

To make Union Joint feel like home, the Graveses dropped the ceilings, applied drywall, fixed the entryway, divided the classrooms into two apartments that the family used and became locally famous for their Christmas lights, wreaths, hand-painted Santa and music, according to the Daily Journal.

The Graves family also experienced mysterious noises in the home, like a TV and radio switching on without human intervention. Their daughter, who moved in with her husband to care for her mom in 1973 after Charles died, said her father attributed the activity to an “old-maid schoolteacher” ghost.

The Graves family embraced the idiosyncrasies.

“We’re do-it-yourselfers,” the daughter told the Daily Journal in 2002. “We’re pioneers. We’d probably be bored to death with a normal house.”

Grissom and Wilson share a similar sentiment about taking on the aged building. With their own hands and the help of contractors and Grissom’s dad, who’s in the commercial real estate business, the couple have replaced the roof, installed new windows, graded the land, repointed brick, added new plumbing, electric and an HVAC system. The list goes on. As Grissom puts it: “You have to be crazy to take it on.”

Now, the pains of that labor are all but invisible in a home that’s filled with natural light, wood doors with hues of marbled hazelnut and warm, ruddy brick walls.

‘The work that we’re doing right now is going to last as long as we can live here’

The Grissom-Wilson family lives on the 4,000-square-foot upper floor of the two-level school, which now includes two-and-a-half bathrooms and four bedrooms. They divided two of the former classrooms into the bedrooms. The other two classrooms include the living room, kitchen and dining area.

In the middle of the floor plan are two former pail rooms, where students used to hang lunches and coats, that now include an office and laundry room. The couple sourced much of their color palette from the Union Joint’s old painted plaster walls.

As an homage to the school’s former life as a barn, the turkey has become the family mascot — appearing on a doorknob, couch pillow and the family crest.

Throughout the home are pieces of the Franklin school’s past as well as furniture from other educational institutions in the U.S. and abroad. The family’s dining table came from an old library in Galesburg, Illinois, and its chairs were previously at a school in Slovenia. A chalkboard from Atlanta, Indiana, greets visitors, and doors from a Philadelphia school cover the laundry room.

Grissom plans to refurbish a cabinet from the couple’s alma mater, Hopewell Elementary, which closed in 1998. The piece still bears labels for the shelf spaces assigned to Wilson and his sister when they were students.

“We’ve been so nomadic and transient over the last decade that it just (had) been building to this, where we get to put down such deep roots,” Grissom said.

She is collecting class photos of Union Joint students through the years and plans to hang them in the entryway. Her mindfulness of former students echoes the attitude of the Graves family, who in 1982 invited the students and their families to an open house — a reunion that was among the first of many that Union Joint alums held at different locations well into the 1990s.

The Johnson County Museum of History and Franklin Daily Journal collected alumni memories of Christmas plays, pitch-in dinners and even one boy’s recollection of running a live wire from the basement gas engine to a classroom door — which ended up shocking the principal. (The principal “grabbed it and kind of shook a little” and then simply told the student to dismantle it, the alum recalled in a 1987 Daily Journal article.)

A school “just adds to a town’s sense of community,” said Rob Shilts, executive director of Franklin Heritage. “That’s why I think it’s so cool that, of all things, they buy a school and you have this many people — it’s got like a million followers that are tracking the progress that they’re making on it. And that’s great. We don’t as a country necessarily always save the important structures.”

Grissom tells the story about the live wire as she walks through the basement, which is home to a playroom but has more space that the couple is still figuring out how to use. Remaining on their renovation list: to complete the window installation, finish the kitchen, refurbish an old drinking fountain, install more chalkboards on the laundry room doors, grow a garden.

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