CANTON – Bob Stevens remembers the stink floating throughout the Canton school when some mischievous students placed chemicals in the air vent of the basement lab.

But the 1942 graduate of what was Canton Elementary and High School until 1966 doesn’t remember that anyone was punished.

“We were just told to not do that again,” he said.

Jackie Cox Conant, a selectman and member of the 1962 graduating class, remembers the dances held at the nearby Odd Fellows Hall, now demolished.

When the eight-room school was built in 1924 it replaced an older school a short distance away. It housed students from kindergarten through high school.

Students knew they were something special as soon as they reached ninth grade – they moved upstairs, while the younger pupils remained on the first floor.

When Canton consolidated with nearby Dixfield to become SAD 21 in the mid-1960s, the small school on the floodplain became home to just elementary-aged students while the older youngsters were transported to Dixfield.

Now, more than 40 years later, and after being closed for two years, the plain, flat-roofed building will soon be demolished as part of the buy-out program resulting from the constant flooding of homes and buildings in the Whitney Brook floodplain.

“It’s a bit of history that will be gone,” said Conant, 62. “Life is changes. This is what happens. It did well by us, but you can’t keep children of today there. It was fine for our era.”