At the start of October, Driftlss moved into the former Rexford-Longfellow Elementary School in Clintonville, and if you caught any of the three videos we posted on Facebook, which have passed 120,000 views between them, you already know this is a pretty unusual home for a web design and marketing agency. We spent the last several months working with businesses across Appleton, New London and the rest of the Fox Valley, and now we get to do that work from inside one of the most historic buildings in Waupaca County.
The Rexford-Longfellow school in Clintonville. Day 1 inside the historic Rexford school in Clintonville (Facebook video)
A school with a long history
The oldest part of the building opened in 1918 as Clintonville High School, designed in the Collegiate Gothic style you’d expect from a school of that era, and it sits on land that the city’s namesake, Urial P. Clinton, donated in the early 1870s for educating Clintonville’s kids. Rexford Elementary was built next door in 1951, and a 1966 addition tied the two together into the complex that generations of local families walked through every morning. In 2018 the building was added to both the State and National Register of Historic Places, which tells you how much this place means to the community and how seriously we take the job of bringing it back to life. You can read more about the building in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s register entry.
The honest answer is that a school is cool, and when a building like this is sitting there waiting for someone to give it a second life, you can just go do it. We think people have gotten too comfortable playing it safe, and too few businesses are willing to take on something big and a little unreasonable because it might be hard. We’d rather be the kind of company that dares to try something great, and moving a Fox Valley web design and marketing agency into a 108-year-old schoolhouse felt like the right way to show what we’re about.
Day 2 inside the historic Rexford school in Clintonville (Facebook video)
What we’re working on inside
Our office is an old science lab on the third floor of the 1918 wing, and our plan for that floor is to keep its original architecture and flooring while bringing everything else up to date so the space feels modern without losing the charm that made us fall in love with it. The overhead cabinets are coming out, while the lower lab cabinets are a tougher call because so much of the original electrical and plumbing runs through them, so we’re taking our time figuring out what to keep and what to rework. The old wooden floors are getting buffed and rewaxed, the walls are getting fresh paint, and we have some ideas brewing for the old panel ceiling that we’ll share as they come together.
Beyond our own floor, the 1918 wing as a whole needs a serious cleaning after years of sitting quiet and collecting dust and grime, and one of the projects we’re most excited about is the original double staircase, which we want to clean up and bring back to the way it looked when students first ran up and down it a century ago. The old auditorium has big plans attached to it for down the road, and the original 1918 gym, with its balcony wrapping overhead, is one of our favorite rooms in the whole building and a great reminder of how much care went into schools back then.
Room for the community
The newer gym is where we hope to give back first. We’re working on getting it cleaned up and opened to the public, hopefully by this winter, so high school teams have a place for practices, tournaments and open gyms, whether they’re coming from right here in Clintonville, from New London, or from anywhere else in the Fox Valley. Good gym space is hard to find in the colder months, and putting this one back to use for local kids feels like exactly what the building was meant for.
A school that served Clintonville for this long is full of history in physical form, including old textbooks and library books, student desks and chairs, teacher’s desks, lab stools and science equipment, chalkboards, pull-down maps and globes, filing cabinets, bookshelves, overhead projectors, and plenty of other classroom odds and ends. Rather than let any of it go to waste, we’re planning a charity sale so former students and local families can take home a piece of the school.
We also want to give a shoutout to our neighbors at the resale shop on the opposite end of the building, who have been great to share the space with, and we’d love to team up with them to host that sale together. Stay tuned for dates.
Day 3 inside the historic Rexford school in Clintonville (Facebook video)
Driftlss in Clintonville
Not much changes about how we work, except that client meetings just got a lot more interesting. Driftlss is still the same web design and marketing agency serving businesses in Appleton, New London, Clintonville and across the Fox Valley, handling everything from custom websites and SEO to paid ads and AI automation. If you’re near Clintonville and want to see the old school in person, or you’re anywhere in Northeast Wisconsin and want a website and marketing partner who isn’t afraid of a big project, we’d love to hear from you.
