Matt Rourke, Associated Press photos Top: Private contractors flattened the Amish school in Nickel Mines before daybreak today. Bottom: Hours later, it looks as if the school never existed. Only the tree, seen in both photos, remains. Click photo for larger image.

NICKEL MINES, Pa. -- Workers with machines moved in before dawn and demolished the one-room Amish schoolhouse where five girls were shot to death and five others were injured Oct. 2.

Construction lights glared in the predawn mist as an excavator began removing the porch of the school about 4:45 a.m., and heavy equipment knocked down the bell tower and toppled the walls within a few minutes.

The quaint schoolhouse had been boarded up since the killings, with schooling moved to a nearby farm. The Amish hoped to bring some resolution to the tragedy by razing the schoolhouse and leaving in its place a quiet pasture.

"I think the Amish leaders made the right decision," Mike Hart, a spokesman for the Bart Fire Company, said as loaders lifted debris into dump trucks to be hauled away.

A group of 20 to 30 people, most of them Amish, gathered nearby to watch as the schoolhouse was leveled. "It seems this is a type of closure for them," Hart said.

"It's going to be razed and topsoil brought in and green grass planted," he said.

The destruction of the West Nickel Mines Amish School came a week after the solemn funerals of four of the five girls killed by gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV. Roberts came armed with a shotgun, rifle, handgun and a stun gun and killed himself after he tied up and shot the girls.

The five girls wounded in the shooting are all still believed to be hospitalized. The hospitals are no longer providing any information about the patients at the request of their families.

Hart, who has been coordinating activities with the Amish community and whose company helped provide security, said private contractors were handling the demolition. The debris was being hauled to a landfill.

Hart had said previously that classes were expected to resume this week at a makeshift schoolhouse in a garage on an Amish farm in the Nickel Mines area.

Associated Press writer Michael Rubinkam contributed to this story.