A Seventh-day Adventist Boarding Academy Serving Native American Youth Since 1946
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The End of an Era and the Dawn of New One
ontrary to popular belief, it was actually the wise king Solomon, not Pete Seeger or The Byrds, who penned the words, “To everything there is a season.” In Ecclesiastes 3:3, Solomon acknowledges that there is “a time to break down, and a time to build up.” No truer words could be applied to the horse barn at Holbrook Indian School (HIS). The school first came to acquire the old structure during the 17-year term of the second principal, Frank Doherty, who was HIS principal from 1949 to 1966. He picked up the building from a WWII military base. Initially, the building was used as a gymnasium, with a basketball hoop at each end. Later on it was utilized as a storage shed for various equipment. Then, along came Mr. Bruce in 2009. He was hired primarily to teach industrial arts classes at the time. However, his background and passion for horses quickly led him to envision a horse program that would benefit many of the students. It was through Mr. Bruce that the equine-assisted learning program came to exist.
36 Pacific Union Recorder
Holbrook Indian School
Pam and Fred Bruce, founder of the HIS horsemanship program, with Diana Fish, development director.
He made plans for the building to be moved and cleaned up. Shortly thereafter, a volunteer mission group from his church in Chatsworth, GA, came to help build stalls and transform the building into a barn for our herd of 10 horses. The building served HIS well for a solid 10 years until the fire marshal came to campus in the fall of 2021 and performed an inspection. During the process, it was discovered that there was a significant support beam missing. The school was told by the fire marshal that the building had to be condemned and it needed to be torn down. It was a bittersweet moment as a lot of wonderful memories had been made within the walls of that old edifice. However, we knew that the structure had met its end, so we took the news as an opportunity to consider building the barn of our dreams—one that would be a greater benefit to our horses and our students. The old