ISLAND LAKE — The town of Pearson, once a bustling farming community between Keyport and Poulsbo, has all but been dissolved save for a few streets and a small peninsula near Scandia that bears the name today.

There is, of course, one other place that immortalizes the defunct town — the local school, and the many memories of the students who have passed through its hallowed halls.

Nowadays, Pearson Elementary serves grades kindergarten through sixth for nearly 400 students. But in another time — and another building on the same site — it was a first through eighth grade schoolhouse with three classrooms and not many more than 50 students per year, at most.

And it was more than a school, serving as the focal point for the tiny community, first as a one-room schoolhouse from 1889 to 1901 on Silverdale Hill, and then to a three-room school, at the current elementary’s location, from 1902 to 1952.

In the same way, reunions of the schoolhouse are less the traditional class gathering and more of a way to reunite a community that once was.

“Everybody knew everybody else and many of us who went to school together were all related,” recalled Lester Schmuck, a 1941 graduate of Pearson, of the former town. “It was just a different way of life.”

To help relive the memories of the Pearson heyday, Schmuck and Shirley (Frykolm) Boehme, a 1948 Pearson graduate, decided to organize the gatherings of all students who attended the 50-year school house.

“We weren’t sure how many would show up,” Boehme said. “But we thought it would be fun to have a reunion.”

In 1989, they held their first reunion at Poulsbo’s Raab Park, and more than 150 people showed up. The success of that reunion spurred the pair to organize one every three years, the sixth of which was held last Thursday at Island Lake Center.

Schmuck, who graduated in the class of 1941 with six others at the first-through-eighth grade school, is the only surviving member of the class.

Like many at the reunion, he’s lived all over the world since his time at Pearson — California, Germany and even Saudi Arabia. It is part of the motivation for having such a reunion.

“Just to get together and see what happened to your old friends,” Schmuck said. “They scattered to the wind, too.”

Many of the former Pearson citizens who attended the reunion also shared a common teacher — Hilder Pearson — for whom the current school is named.

Born in 1893, she was the daughter of the small community’s founders, Swedish immigrants Agatha and PerJohn Pearson. The story goes that though the Pearsons originally spelled their name ‘Person,’ the local post office, upon naming the town after the family, inserted the letter ‘a’ to ensure correct pronunciation.

Pearson graduated from Bellingham Normal School in 1916, which would later become Western Washington University.

After teaching in Yelm for a couple of years, Pearson became a homemaker. She was married to a man named Walter Johnson who ran the town store.

During that time, she had a son, also named Walter Johnson, who would go onto graduate from Pearson in 1935. Johnson, now 82, attended last Thursday’s reunion.

He said that when the local schoolhouse of the same last name required a new teacher, Pearson was asked to take up the job. She signed on for $899 per year, Johnson recalled.

Johnson described his mother as being highly dedicated to her teaching, remembering the joy he’d see her experience in the classroom and the dismay she had for administrative duties.

“She would have much rather been teaching than fill out paperwork,” Johnson said. “The dedication is what distinguished her.”

She became the community educator in many ways, in a bucolic farming town that all the reunion’s attendants would attest was a glorious place to be a kid.

“I think I had the most wonderful childhood,” recalled Adene (Lynum) Vig, who graduated from the Pearson school in 1931. “It was just an idyllic place to live.”

Vig remembered a time when the Mosquito Fleet vessel “Hyak” could deliver the Pearson community, which was often carrying farming goods to sell, to the Seattle Farmers Market. And the Puget Sound wasn’t the easy way to get around.

“You could go any place, there were paths everywhere,” she recalled. “Through all the neighbors’ land.”

Everyone had some kind of farm, and Vig said her family had a large garden, and a cow. She even inherited the horse that the mailman used when the post office retired the horse-and-buggy system of delivering mail.

The old schoolhouse had three classrooms and a large field where the kids played. There as a teeter-totter, swings and a baseball diamond.

Many students walked in excess of a mile to get to school each day.

Hammond Wilson, who graduated from Pearson in 1929, recalled a day when a snow storm made it nearly impossible to walk to school. A neighbor volunteered his horse to pick up the children and deliver them safely to Pearson.

Back at Island Lake Hall Thursday were many remarks of “Remember when?” and lots of hugs between those reunited, perhaps for the first time since childhood. Familiar faces, such as the three Soderberg sisters who attended the school and the Jensen family — which has seen four generations attend Pearson — discuss times of a different day.

“This is great,” remarked Al Jensen, eldest of the four generations and a 1932 Pearson grad.