It Happened Here-- America learns to Read & Write                                                               American*

                                                                 (*the New York experience)                                           

Spurred on by the Calvinist belief that the Faithful needed to be guided/inspired/directed by the "word of God" itself the early Dutch communities along the Hudson began organizing schools to teach their children to read the Bible  soon after  the Reformed Church in Holland began assigning "Dominies" to communities.  Likewise, the Palatine-German and French Huguenot  (Protestant) communities did the same.

A year after they arrived in East Camp the Palatines built their first school, in 1711,  undoubtedly before many homes were finished.   Co. Rte. 33 cor. Amber Lane, Germantown.

Co. Rte. 402, Westerlo

The Huguenot first church/school was built  eight years  after the settlement was founded in 1675.  Huguenot St. at cemetery, New Paltz.

Most colonial school buildings, like most of  the common houses, barns, shops and miscellaneous buildings of ordinary people did not survive the hundred and twenty five or so years of the colonial period, through the next two centuries to today, and were abandoned, repurposed (and surprisingly often) broken up with their component parts used in other buildings.  Except where some historical incident occurred at them, their sites are not generally recognized by the NYSHMs                                         

                                                                                                                                                                                 Co. Rte. 80, Port Jervis                                                                                                     

Rte. 30, Schoharie

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Though the Adsit cabin (1778?, 1794?) was never used as a school, many of the earliest New York schools probably looked like tis. 
Co. Rte 27, Willsboro

                                                                                                       Co. Rte 31, East Springfield  

As the American Revolution drew to a close with the British defeated at Yorktown and Americans waiting anxiously month after month for the diplomats to hammer out a peace treaty, Americans had time to reflect on what their new society and government should become. Even the "king's English" came under question.  Should the language of their former oppressor continue as the language of a free people?  In some predominately German areas the notion that German, a "people's language", should become the official language was considered.  In Boston there was even discussion about making Hebrew the              official language for government and business, to be taught in schools. Generally, it was believed                          



American English grammar should be simplified and American spelling reflect more the ways words were pronounced. Everywhere was the belief that the moral education taught in schools needed to be supplemented with civic education for a new republic.  Nowhere were these ideas more frequently discussed than among the officers of the Continental Army in cantonment at New Windsor. A friend of several officers and frequent visitor to the cantonment was one Noah Webster, who taught school in a small private academy to the children of wealthy townsmen in Goshen, a few miles from New Windsor           Webster would live in Goshen only two years but in those two years he would find a cause and a project that would dominate most of the rest of his life, and make him famous.  He would write a little book known after its first editions by its blue back (cover) that would outsell every other book in 19th century America, except the Bible!  This"American Spelling Book" that taught children how to read phonetically simplified common words and would be followed in later years by a more complete grammar,  and a book of readings that was also popular until surpassed by Mc Guffy's Reader in the       1830's. In 1801 he began work on an American Dictionary of the English Language which he would continue to enlarge and improve upon until 1828. New American words like chowder, skunk and hickory were included. Webster continued 

his crusade to simplify and rationalize American language.  Musick became music;  plough became plow;  centre became center; and the silent u in colour and favour was dropped. Other changes were rejected over time.  Tung never replaced tongue and wimmen never women, though clearly wimmen  is more phonetically more accurate.

                             41 Webster Av., Goshen

       Goshen Town Hall                         

In 1784 Governor George Clinton appointed a state Board of Regents to study education in New York State.  In 1787 it was given the power to re-certify New York's Kings College (now known as Columbia College) and to charter additional colleges and academies.  By the first decades of the 19th century some 400 academies had been chartered. (More on this in a future post.) By 1795 sale of state lands (product, largely of the expulsion of Indian populations) enabled a fund to be amassed for public education.  Towns were encouraged to establish schools, which based on their populations would receive matching funds. By 1800 the state fund was exhausted and state legislators led by Jedediah Peck led a 12 year fight to get State support for common schools reestablished. (see NYSHMs:It Happened Here--"A Man of Public Usefulness and Private Worth, Aug. 13, 2016.) Each township was required to       establish                                                                                                                                                         local schools, with state matching support, to hire teachers and provide facilities, administered by local school boards. With rural populations so scattered  and transportation difficult, it was necessary to set up many local schools

Rte.443, Berne

Most cities had a patchwork collection of schools providing primary education--private, tuition schools for wealthy families, congregation based religious schools and a few charity schools. In 1805 New York City led the way for urban public schools by forming the Free School Society, for years scraping by on public donations and by employing the Lancasterian

system, teaching a core of older student "Monitors"to instruct large numbers of younger students.  As large numbers of immigrants came to the cities of New York State they began to object to the Protestant biases of the public educational systems. Extensive parochial school systems developed. By the 1840's large numbers of Catholic parents whose children were still in the NYC Free School Society system continued to object to the Society's biases and the city Board of Education reorganized the system to a series of Ward based schools similar to rural township based schools which gave local ethnic communities a measure of greater local control. (Unfortunately the vast number of urban primary school came, served their purpose and were replaced overtime with few public markers or plaques to record their existence, or their passing.)

Public, yes, but privately funded by the Patroon's family, the Livingstons.     U,S.,Rte 9, Clermont

By the end of the first two or three decades of the 19th century, rural and town  school houses were being built and taking on the features we would all recognize as the classic "one room schoolhouse."   One story, post and frame buildings with clapboard siding painted white or barn-red and multiple windows on both sides and ends for light, they occasionally had a small cupola mounted on them with a bell to summon children to school.

                                        Potter's Hollow School, Potter Hollow Rd., Co Rte 354. Preston Hollow

Of course, there could be a great deal of variety:

NYSHM for the "OldStone Schoolhouse"   Rte 28/30  Margretville                         

                                                                    Cobblestone Schoolhouse, cor. Center and Elm St.  Geneseo

A shingled schoolhouse, Rt. 85A Voorheesville

                                                      Huguenot School, made from  local Neversink River Valley Bricks

                                                                                    Rte 203, Huguenot, NY

Inside, a separate cloak room  helped keep out winter drafts from the class room and provided  space for hanging outer garments.  In the classroom, the rude benches of earlier years were being replaced by rows of "school desks"-- chairs or sometimes, backed benches, with desk-writing surfaces attached to their backs for students sitting behind them.  Most would be of all wood, of local construction.  Not until later would cast iron framed commercial school desks be available.  Most classrooms would be heated with a small, centrally located box stove, likely produced in Albany or Troy.  

Young unmarried men would often teach school in winter and before and after the growing season.  Women often taught more in summers, late spring and early fall  when there would be fewer older boys who would be working during these seasons, in farming activities. Gradually women would come to predominate the one room school when penny-pinching school boards believed they could pay them less than men.

          Garfield Rd., off of NY Rte 2, Eagle Mills

Perhaps the most famous New York one room school teacher in literature is Ichabod Crane, the character  based on Washington Irving's friend,  Jesse Merwin who taught school in Kinderhook.   This schoolhouse is a replacement for the one Jessie Merwin taught in. Merwin mentions the original school's destruction in an 1851 letter to Irving.

Next Time--  The Learning Continues: Academies & Seminaries