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Wolcott’s Old Stone School
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a 1927 Photo of the Old Stone Schoolhouse students
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Life during the Old Stone School’s active years—roughly 1821-1930—was a good deal more stable than it is for a generation growing up with Pac Man and Middle East wars in living color.
The school—formerly known as the Woodtick Schoolhouse—was enrolled this spring on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of historic properties recognized by the federal government as worthy of preservation.
Susan E. Ryan, a national register consultant, described the schoolhouse as “the principal extant landmark of Wolcott’s distinguished 19th-century public school system. It is also architecturally significant (1) as the only remaining, intact example of early 19th-century locally-quarried granite construction in the town, and (2) as a revealing example of the early, rural schoolhouse in Connecticut and New England as a whole.”
Many of the people who passed through the school have left memoirs of their years there. The reminiscences are, in many cases, remarkably eloquent reminders of the tradition out of which today’s public schools have evolved.
In a reminiscence written in 1964 for the Wolcott Historical Society, Margaret Hall recalled, “children in Wolcott went to district schools, wearing aprons for the girls, long black stockings and knee pants for the boys, until they attained adolescence. Overalls and bare feet were popular in summer. There was very little youth rebellion, now called juvenile delinquency.”
The writings also describe a world that changed far more slowly than ours, though the pace of life was accelerating by the time the school was closed as an education institution. The school was replaced in 1930 by the building that now houses the Police Department, but was used to accommodate overflow from that school during 1942-43.
William Andrus Alcott, one of the distinguished 19th century Wolcott educators cited by Ms. Ryan, described the schools’ curriculum in the early part of that century in his 1831 publication, “Annals of Education.”
“Writing and spelling were leading studies every day, and on Saturday the old Assembly Catechism, in the Congregational order and the Episcopal order, were regularly repeated. Arithmetic was taught by a few instructors one or two evenings in a week.
“In teaching the alphabet it was customary for the instructor to take his seat, and point to the letters precisely in the order in which they are placed in the book, A, B, C, etc. If the pupil could name the letter immediately, it was well; if not, he was told it.”
Alcott—who was related to Amos Bronson Alcott, the utopian philosopher, and author Louisa May Alcott—was a pragmatic and influential critic of 19th century education. His description of spelling lessons was part of a broader criticism of the emphasis on rote learning that prevailed during that time. His major work, “Essay on the Construction of Schoolhouses,” may have been influenced by the Old Stone School.
“The Stone School was the most ambitious schoolhouse constructed in Wolcott while Alcott was teaching in the town, during the years just prior to the publication of this essay,” Ms. Ryan writes. “The building anticipates some of the educator’s recommendations, such as elevated site, location on a principal road, solid and permanent construction, and numerous windows to provide ample light and ventilation.”
Some of the school’s features Alcott did not favor, however. One was the “writing shelf,” a desk surface that was attached to the wall and extended around the perimeter of the room. The students sat at the shelf on benches, facing the wall and with their backs to the teachers.
Besides making communication with the teacher difficult, the seats undoubtedly grew quite cold in the winter months. Teachers’ records of school sessions contain such notations as “School dismissed—ice on walls—too cold to teach.”
The younger children were allowed to sit on benches around the fireplace or, after 1898, the wood stove, according to Historical Society Executive Secretary John Washburne. The older ones, however, sat along the wall, wearing their hats, coats, boots and mittens, and taking turns warming themselves at the stove.
The late Irene Sullivan Coughlan, who taught at the school in 1914, recalled several years ago that “my duties were custodian as well as teacher. The biggest problem was keeping the pot-belly stove well fed.”
For Lillian Carr, a teacher at the school in 1895-96, keeping the fire going was a modest way to supplement her weekly pay of $6.
“An added emolument was $2 a term for serving as janitor, she wrote.” “It could hardly be called custodian at $2 a term, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and a skunk as bad. The janitor work consisted of sweeping the floor and building the fire. The larger girls gladly did the sweeping.”
Two themes that run throughout the memoirs are the importance of religion in education and the teacher’s freedom to discipline the students—physically if necessary.
Ethel Loring Somes, who came to the school as a 21-year-old teacher in 1925 and stayed until its closing in 1930, said in an interview Friday from her home in Maine that her years in the school were among the best in her 38 years of teaching. She noted, however, that “the school at that time belonged to the teacher,” with “conscience” as her guide in treating the students fairly. With “someone looking over their shoulder all the time,” teachers today often seem little more than “babysitters,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want to go into teaching now, as much as I loved it then,” said Mrs. Somes. Miss Carr defended flogging, as did other teachers:
“While that form of puishment [sic] may have been used too often in those days, it has gone to the other extreme now. It is often the most efficacious. When a child received a well-deserved punishment in school and another awaited him at home, the parents always upholding the teacher when right—that was worth more than all the PTA’s in Christendom.”
Though prayer in schools and corporal punishment were still allowed in 1925, other aspects of life were beginning to change. While Miss Carr and Mrs. Coughlan tell how they walked to the school from Waterbury, Mrs. Somes arrived in 1925 by taxi. She described the experience in a 1977 letter to Washburne:
“I had taken a taxi from the railroad in Waterbury and the five miles seemed endless. I was very young, having graduated (from normal school) only one year before, and even the [sic], had visions of being kidnapped. It was a popular fad at that time to go to another state and thus I, too, was seeking adventure.”
The demographic makeup of Wolcott was also beginning to shift. No longer was it a purely Yankee farming town. Mrs. Somes estimates that three-fourths of her students were from immigrant families, and she believes that contributed to the energy with which her pupils approached education.
“The parents were very cooperative,” said Mrs. Somes. “They wanted their kids to get ahead faster than they did.”
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