The placement of schoolhouses provided a forum for animated and often colorful local debate during the late 19th century. Local newspaper editors occasionally interspersed references culled from national educational debates within their columns, indicating that their readers were well aware of the issues and the rhetoric of national politics surrounding public schools. The increasing importance of the school building in the community, and the changing architecture of schools communicated both a new institutional structure and changing social beliefs about schools and schooling. These emerging social beliefs are illustrated in the debates in the communities of San Bernardino and Riverside, California, during the late 1880s. In San Bernardino, California, the location of a proposed new school building convulsed the community for nearly six months. In the end, the new school, one of the largest in Southern California at the time, stood as a crowning ornament of the city. In the meantime, the San Bernardino City Council and the Board of School Trustees, both serving identical constituents, embroiled the city in a battle over whether the city or the school board owned one of the schoolhouses then serving as the Police Court and City Hall. The rhetoric of the debate in the local press, described here over a minor civic dispute, illustrates the emerging vision of schooling in the Gilded Age and the importance of the school as a civic institution.