east campus there. Memorial Park, the city's next public park, was dedicated on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), 1922, in ceremonies that were presided over by Brigadier General Abel Davis of Glencoe, Illinois. The section of Memorial Park running adjacent to Burr Oak Avenue with of frontage on Highland Avenue had originally been laid out as a cemetery in the early 1850s, when this section of Blue Island was a long walk from the populated section of the town. Although the cemetery was added to and improved in subsequent years, it was closed by village ordinance in 1898, and almost all of the remains interred there were moved to Mt. Greenwood Cemetery in Chicago, which had been developed by citizens from Blue Island. The acquisition of the entire parcel bounded by Burr Oak Avenue, Highland Avenue, Walnut Street and the B & O tracks was completed by the park district in 1935. The park at that point had reached its present size of , and eventually, with the help of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Alphabet agencies, was provided with landscaping and acquired an outdoor swimming pool, playground equipment, and an Art Deco stadium that seated 1,000 persons (demolished in December 2009). With the closing of Central Park, Memorial Park has become the flagship of the Blue Island park system. The site of Centennial Park on the east side of Blue Island was acquired from the East Side Development Association in 1935 for $11,500 (). This park provides a field house, athletic fields and playground equipment. The city operates the Meadows Golf Club, a , 18-hole golf course that was designed by J. Porter Gibson and opened in 1994. Government Nearly all of Blue Island is in Illinois's 1st congressional district; the portion east of Interstate 57 is in the 2nd district. Education As the largest settlement in the southern part of Cook County in the middle of the nineteenth century, Blue Island was an important trading and cultural center. The village offered educational opportunity to its residents as early as 1845 in the form of a private school for girls that was operated by local citizens, and public education was introduced in 1846 with the construction of a one-room schoolhouse that served the community exclusively for that purpose until the first Whittier School was built in 1854. The one-room schoolhouse was repurposed several times in subsequent years and still stands,