In spite of the flexibility of teachers and the resilience of children, the field of education usually meets with notorious resistance to change. My father, a school principal, when introducing an educational innovation would recall the dire predictions of behavioral and academic ramifications sparked by students switching from fountain pens to pencils! As schools face unprecedented changes this year, “Our Rural Heritage” reviews the metamorphosis of our local schools over the course of the last century.
According to “Connecticut Genealogy: Windham County”, prior to Hampton’s incorporation in 1786, a committee formed to divide the Society into school districts. Perimeters were established in 1763 with the Burnt Cedar Swamp serving as a major demarcation as well as residents’ properties, similar to the boundaries found on old deeds. School houses were built “in the northeast district near Deacon Griffin’s house, and two in the northwest…one nine rods south of William Holt’s, another eight rods west of John Fuller’s.” Eventually, seven districts — Appaquag, Rawson, Boston Hollow, Bigelow, Howard Valley, Clark’s Corner and Hampton Hill — were recognized villages, the seven one-room schoolhouses serving students in grades one through eight.
In “School Days”, Charlie Halbach recounted: “Our school day started outdoors. We formed a semi-circle around the flagpole and then recited the Pledge of Allegiance. School started at 9:00 am and ended at 3:00 pm. The building had only one room and all eight grades were in it together. The most students I ever remember being at Goshen were fifteen. Everyone packed a lunchbox. We were allowed to bring fishing rods, bow and arrows and 22 rifles to school if we were planning on hunting or fishing after school.” And almost as though he knew we would someday wonder, “We had two weeks when school was shut down because of a scarlet fever epidemic. Pauline Vickers was hired to wash the entire building with Lysol.”
“We all joined in the Lord’s Prayer,” Arthur Kimball reminisced of the start of school at Appaquag, recalling the curriculum in Hampton Remembers. “We were anywhere from fifteen to twenty children ranging in age from six to sixteen and graded strictly according to ability. A fourteen-year-old and a nine-year-old would often be using the same book… Every day we had assignments in reading, writing and arithmetic, history and geography and twice a week spelling and physiology. We had penmanship fifteen minutes every day.”
Margaret Easton, one of the few left to tell us of life in the original schoolhouses, relayed what recess consisted of at the ABC Schoolhouse: “There was no place to play games, no place for baseball, only room for something like jump rope. So the older kids would take us for a walk up and down the road at noon time.” With no ball fields or playground equipment, students from that era remembered the games played at recess: ‘Duck on the Rock’, ‘Haley Over’, ‘Red Light’, and chasing games – tag and ‘Fox and Geese’ in the snow. John Hammond, who began at Bell School in 1897, recalled in Hampton Remembers, “We didn’t have a playground but we used to get over in the lot on the east side and play in there some until we were told to get out…We done a lotta sliding. We’d go right up the hill there and go clear up to “Hovihi”, then slide down the hill, turn the corner and go right down to the grist mill…Will Jewett had a cranberry bog that flooded every winter. We used to go up there skating at noon time.”
Schools then, as now, experienced census fluctuations. In Hampton Remembers, Helen Whitehouse relayed the family “went to school down to this Bell School and there was no school. Because there was only two children!” John Hammond remembered, “There wasn’t enough scholars to keep North Bigelow School and Bell School both open so…three of the youngest Fuller children come up to school there.” And Wendell Davis lamented, “When I was in the fourth grade at the Center School, I was the fourth grade, lock, stock and barrel.”
In 1899, residents from each of the districts formed a committee to deliberate whether it would be “advisable to abolish one or more school districts”, and in 1909 a town meeting voted to assume responsibility for all of the schools, supervised by a committee of nine elected members with rotating terms, a precursor to our current school board. Efforts to further unify the schools were thwarted, however, with the following 1927 resolution: “That we are irrevocably opposed to further consolidation of our schools whereby such consolidation means a furtherance of the whims of state paid supervisors.” In spite of this staunch resistance, the seven schools eventually consolidated into three – Bell School for the primary grades, Center School for grades four, five and six, and Clark’s Corners for seventh and eighth graders. Barbara Fitzgerald O’Connor relayed that the census sometimes dictated where the children were placed, with third grade, for example, at Bell or Center School, depending on the student count.
Peggy Fox, who attended the Bell School, confirms that reading, writing and arithmetic were the core subjects. History and geology were also taught, and penmanship was very important. Books and blackboards were the main materials, and children gathered their chairs in a circle at the front of the room for their lessons. The Center School also housed the Town Hall, and Jane Marrotte recalled that when the teacher taught Civics at Center School, she would bring the students upstairs to learn about the roles of government.
Modern conveniences, or lack thereof, particularly with regard to plumbing, is an often visited recollection. At Bell School, George Miller wrote that the drinking water was from a spring at the edge of the swamp, and Jane Marrotte added that students used a dipper to pour water from the pail into little paper cups. At Clark’s Corners, Barbara Fitzgerald O’Connor recalled, “When we ran out of cups we used arithmetic paper, and there was a way of folding it to make a flat, pointy cup.” More primitively, at the ABC Schoolhouse, Margaret Easton relayed that “we had to get a bucket of water from the family across the road and we all had to drink out of the ladle – dipped it in, drank from it, put it back in.” Collecting the water was an arduous procedure. Charlie Halbach explained: “We would fetch the water from the Jewett property across what is now Route 6, using a couple of pails…The crankshaft had a sprocket over which a chain traveled and small buckets were attached to the chain. When the crank was turned the small buckets dipped into the well water below and were filled with water. When the buckets reached the top, they tipped releasing the water into a sluiceway and into our waiting pails. Probably 24 to 30 buckets holding about two cups each were needed to fill our pails”.
Every schoolhouse contained a woodstove, and according to Barbara Fitzgerald O’Connor, “If you sat close to it, you roasted. If you sat a distance from it, you froze.” In Hampton Remembers teacher Anna McDermott recalled: “I had to build a fire every morning and eventually learned how to bank it at night so there would be some live coals the following morning. Of course over the weekend the building became icy cold. I always went to the school Sunday afternoon, started the fire, swept the floor, dusted, did the board work and prepared my lesson plans for the week.”
And then there were the dreaded outhouses. George Howell explained: “We had outhouses in the back of the school house, the girls on the right and the boys on the left. In the winter, getting there presented several problems, deep snow and snow drifts. Older students helped small children dress for the trip to the outhouse and cleared a path for them by shuffling their feet through the snow.” And though there were tales of walking for miles to school, many students traveled on a “democrat wagon”, as Harold Stone described, with “seats going along the sides front to back instead of sideways…an early school bus!”
The era of the one room school house ended in 1950 with the construction of the Consolidated School. The Parent Teacher Association, whose members, among other things, scrubbed the outhouses, eventually ran for the school board and worked toward building a modern school. Kathleen Fitzgerald, who began at Bell School, went to the new school for sixth, seventh and eighth grade. There were still so few students, however, that the three grades were in the same room, with teacher Sophie Jenkins also serving as the school’s principal. Things weren’t much different, except that the school, and the schoolyard, were much larger, and of course, there was the indoor plumbing and school buses. A cooperative kindergarten was also organized in 1950 by Alison Davis and Leila Ostby in the chapel at the Congregational Church.
Not long after its completion, the consolidated school’s population increased exponentially, and classes filled with twenty to thirty students. An auditorium, with a stage for performances and an enormous screen for movies, doubled as a cafeteria at noon and a gymnasium for physical education. The playground was huge, with slides and swings, asphalt spaces for jump rope and hop scotch, fields for baseball and hills for sledding. We walked to the library once a week. Programs grew along with the population. Special education, remedial reading, music and art class, kindergarten. The necessity of additional classrooms partitioned half of the auditorium, and placed a portable classroom where the tennis courts are now. The stage served as the library. Though seventh and eighth graders transferred to Parish Hill when the regional middle/high school was completed in 1968, the consolidated school was crowded.
Responses to a 1987 survey revealed that most residents favored new construction. A committee was appointed, a parcel of land selected, an architectural firm hired, and a 292-256 vote in May of 1988 approved the building of a new elementary school with a cost to the town of approximately 1.5 million. In the winter of 1991, staff and students, with the help of community members, “paraded” to the new school, where an original one-room-schoolhouse bell was displayed in the lobby. The student count swelled to almost two hundred, with many grades divided into two classes, and in the last decade, the population has dwindled to less than a hundred, and grades are, once again, combined.
This spring, the pandemic forced extraordinary changes, as our schools closed and learning, thanks to technology, was delivered on-line. Here’s a sample, compliments of Parish Hill, of virtual learning: “In response to the current pandemic, World Affairs Council reached out to high school students across the state and provided them with the opportunity to participate in virtual Model United Nations debates. Students who signed up received their country appointments and prepared their debate topics. These two hour simulations, hosted via Zoom, put students in the middle of the action debating some of today’s most pressing global issues while giving them an opportunity to develop an argument, research global issues, and defend their research based resolutions.” We’re not sure how our schoolhouses handled the pandemic of 1918, but it’s doubtful they would have imagined this!
As staff and students return to school to face changes more significant than any in their lifetimes, we hope some comfort is found in the knowledge that children have always thrived here, and that the community wishes them all well.
Dayna McDermott