Editor’s note: Due to a production error, an incomplete version of this report was printed April 3. It is being reprinted in its entirety here.

CANTON – Bob Stevens remembers the stink floating through 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,” said Stevens, 81, and treasurer of the Canton Historical Society. He was one of 13 students who graduated that year.

Jackie Cox Conant, a town selectman and member of the five-student 1962 graduating class, remembers the dances held at the nearby Odd Fellows Hall, now demolished. She and other girls in her class were all coronation candidates

When the eight-room school was built in 1924, it was a shiny new facility, replacing an older school located just 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.

Many small towns had their own high school prior to the 1960s when the state mandated consolidation.

When Canton consolidated with nearby Dixfield to become SAD 21 with Carthage in the mid-1960s, the small school located 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 buyout 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.”

Clinton Conant, 73, and a member of the nine-student Class of 1951, is equally philosophical.

“It was about the people, the teachers. I don’t see any way of using it,” he said. Conant is Jackie’s brother-in-law.

But Canton High School was where he got his first look at Boston and all the glories it revealed to a youth from a small Maine town.

He remembers a Mr. Lynburner, who served as coach, teacher and principal, bringing the basketball team – the Canton Pirates – to Boston Gardens to play a Catholic school team.

“That was the first time I had ever seen glass backboards,” he said, adding that the principal and teachers always saw that students were able to experience new things. “That’s the kind of things they did.”

Stevens also traveled to Boston with his agricultural class.

“We saw a black leopard that scared the hoop out of us,” he said.

He also remembers feeling pretty cool as he and his classmates hung out on a Boston sidewalk. He and all nine of his siblings graduated from Canton High School.

Jackie Conant, as selectman, said bids will likely go out for the school’s demolition, as well as for the demolition of several homes on the floodplain, in a couple of months.

Diane Ray, coordinator of special projects for the town, said asbestos must first be removed from the old school. She estimated about $125,000 from a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant will be needed to demolish and remove the old school. She said she is looking for more federal money to continue the demolition of nearly 65 homes on the floodplain.

Voters overwhelmingly approved razing the old school at its annual town meeting in March.

The future of the lot isn’t certain, although town officials said nothing can be built on it.

Jackie Conant said the town’s recreation committee will likely decide what to do with it.

The school may soon be gone, but its graduates and the historical society have amassed yearbooks, photographs and other memorabilia from the high school.

And on the first Saturday in August, anyone who ever attended the school gathers to talk about old times.