USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Farmington > Farmington papers > Part 4
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Writing was an accomplishment not considered neces- sary for females. To the girls and smaller children, a female teacher gave instruction in the summer months. In
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1747 the society " granted to ye Scoll dame yt kept scool of the Inhabitants att Sider brook ye same Sallery pr week as they gave ye dames in the Town plat."
The Dames' School was an institution with which the first settlers had been familiar in the land of their child- hood. Shenstone, born in 1714, thus describes good Mis- tress Sarah Lloyd, his early teacher, in the poem of " The Schoolmistress : "
" In every village mark'd with little spire, Embowered in trees, and-hardly known to fame, There dwells, in lowly shed and mean attire, A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name, Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame.
The noises intermixed, which thence resound, Do learning's little tenement betray ; Where sits the dame, disguised in look profound, And eyes her fairy throng, and turns her wheel around."
I am not aware that the spinning wheel forms a part of the philosophical apparatus of the modern school, nor would the youthful schoolmistress of the present day find much in common with the dame of two centuries ago, either in appearance or manner or attire.
"" Her cap, far whiter than the driven snow, Emblem right meet, of decency does yield ; Her apron, dyed in grain, as blue, I trowe, As is the hare-bell that adorns the field ; And in her hand, for scepter, she does wield Tway birchen sprays, with anxious fears entwined, With steadfast hate and sharp affliction joined, And fury uncontrolled, and chastisement unkind."
Possibly, good Mistress Lloyd might have had some- thing on the other hand to say about the boy Shenstone. In more loving terms does Henry Kirke White paint the village matron of his youth, good Mistress Garrington.
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" Gentle of heart, yet knowing well to rule. Staid was the dame, and modest was the mien, Her garb was coarse, yet whole and nicely clean ; Her neatly border'd cap, as lily fair, Beneath her chin was pinn'd with decent care ; And pendant ruffles of the whitest lawn, Of ancient make her elbows did adorn. Faint with age, and dim were grown her eyes ; A pair of spectacles their want supplies."
Let us not regret that " Old times are changed, old manners gone." But what shall we say of the discipline of the winter school with its big boys and strong-armed master? The Puritan took the Bible, Old Testament as well as New, for his infallible guide, and when he read "He that spareth his rod hateth his son," he did not pre- sume to be wiser than Solomon. It was the Englishman's belief that the learned languages could only be taught by a constant application of the rod. Bennet Langton is said to have once complimented Dr. Johnson on his skill in Latin. "Sir," said the great moralist, "my master whipt me very well. Without that I should have done nothing." It was a common notion of the older boys in New Eng- land schools, down to quite a recent time, that a master who had not the physical ability to give them a sound thrashing could teach them nothing. Many years ago a gentleman, then prominent in the public affairs of the town, told me the custom in the district school of his boyhood. Winter after winter the boys had turned the master out of doors, until the school had become a total failure. The committee were at their wits' end. Finally, they heard of a young man in a distant town who thought he could teach the school. The committee thought otherwise, but, as no one else would undertake it, they engaged him. The very first day showed the boys that a new manner of man
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had come among them, and they went home battered and bruised and howling to their parents for vengeance. Their fathers were terribly enraged, and vowed that the very next morning they would show that master that he could not treat their boys in that sort of way. When the school bell jingled the next morning, every boy was in his place and everything went on in perfect order. An unusual still- ness pervaded the room, but it was a deathlike stillness that boded no good to the master. A fire of oak logs was blazing in the fire-place, and the master now and then stirred it up with the big iron shovel, which somehow he neglected to remove from the logs, and left it there with its long iron handle sticking out within easy reach of his desk. It was none too soon, for in a few minutes half a dozen burly men tramped into the room without any use- less ceremony of knocking, and, having briefly stated their business, made a rush for the schoolmaster. Drawing the huge iron shovel, blazing red-hot from the fire, he brought it down on their luckless pates with all the power of his strong arm. If the cherubim, who guarded the gate of Eden, with their flaming swords turning every way, had appeared among them, they could not have been more over- whelmed with astonishment. Their action was short and decisive. In a few moments all that remained of the in- truders was a very bad smell of burnt woolen and singed hair. The school that winter was a great success. Never had the boys made such progress in the "three Rs," but when the committee endeavored to secure the master's services for the next winter, he declined. He had proved his ability to teach school, and wandered away to fresh fields of usefulness.
The first schoolhouse in Farmington of which we have any mention was ordered in 1688, when the town voted
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" that they would have a town house to keep school in, built this year, of eighteen-foot square, besides the chimney space, with a suitable height for that service, which house is to be built by the town's charge." The clause relating to the chimney is significant. Chimneys were at first built on the outside of the houses. They were not built of bricks, for there were no bricks in the country except those brought by the Dutchmen from Holland. They were not built of stone, because they had no lime for mortar but the little they could obtain from the burning of oyster shells. So they built their chimneys of wood, laid up log- house fashion, and lined with clay. Of course the clay was continually coming off, and the houses taking fire. The town, therefore, every year elected, along with its other officers, a set of men called chimney viewers, whose busi- ness it was to inspect these chimneys once in six weeks in winter, and once a quarter in summer, and who were to be fined ten shillings for any neglect of duty. This old plan of paying no salaries, but of imposing fines for . every neglect of duty, did not tend to make offices the spoils of political victory. The vote to build this year was not carried out. Two years after they added to their committee for this purpose. The fourth and fifth years find them voting about finishing the house. We do not know where it stood, but probably near the church on the land reserved for public uses. This house, which was five years in building, continued in use but twenty-five years, when the town voted that they would not build a new schoolhouse but repair the old one, and then, before the meeting adjourned, voted not to repair. The next year, in 1717, the Ecclesiastical Society took the matter in hand and voted " to erect a new schoolhouse with all convenient speed," and this time, that there should forever be no doubt
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as to its site, they voted that it should be " on ye meeting house green and near where the old chestnut tree stood." This house was in use until May, 1756, when the society voted to sell the schoolhouse in the meeting-house yard to the highest bidder. Five months before they had voted to build two houses sixteen feet square, or as much larger as the committee should judge needful, one at the North end of the town and one at the South end. From this time - on school-houses rapidly multiplied. A division of the town into twelve school districts was adopted June 16, 1773, and the inhabitants were empowered " to erect school- houses in their respective districts where and when they please." Gov. Treadwell reports about the year 1809 that " each of these districts is accommodated with a school- house convenient and in good repair, excepting the Middle and North schoolhouses, which are too small for the number of scholars." What the interior arrangement of the Middle District schoolhouse was, which seemed a model of conven- ience to the Governor, has been described to me by one who remembers it as long ago as 1820. The arrangement was the one that I remember at a much later period in the Wat- erville district. Around the wall on all sides ran a wide board nailed up at a convenient angle. In front, for a seat, was a rough slab, sawed side upward, supported on legs driven into augur holes and often projecting above them to the no small discomfort of the occupants. The whole arrangement was exceedingly simple. Was a class called on to recite, - there was no complex marching out to music, but each child, swinging his feet over the seat, dropped them down on the other side, and the class at once sat facing the teacher ready for recitation. Recita- tion over, they swung their feet back again and studies went on as before.
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In regard to the support of the public schools of the town, it would be interesting to trace the gradual change in the law from year to year, but time will not suffice. Those who desire this knowledge will find it most fully set down in the report of the Hon. Henry Barnard to the legis- lature of 1853. In the year 1685 it was voted to estab- lish " a free school in this town " with the limitation only, that if the appropriation proved insufficient the balance should be made up by the inhabitants whose tax-list amounted to one hundred pounds. To all others the school was to be absolutely free. The plan was, however, soon given up, and the former plan was renewed, of voting about ten pounds a year, and leaving the parents of the scholars to make up the rest. Each family was also to provide a load of wood in the winter. This plan, with little variation (the provision about wood only excepted), continued until the State, in 1868, made all the public schools free. I well remember, while committee of the North District, making out year after year the rate-bills under which the parents, usually the poorer ones, paid a large part of the school expenses. This may have done some little good in making them value what cost them heavily, but on the whole, the plan was oppressive and unwise. As time went on and our ancestors, by patient toil and frugal habits, earned for themselves a more gen- erous life, their first thought was to build up certain funds which would, they fondly thought, give their descendants a free school for all time. These funds were five in number. In the years 1737 and 1738 the land forming the town- ships Canaan, Cornwall, Goshen, Kent, Norfolk, Salisbury, and Sharon were sold by the Colony of Connecticut and the money distributed among the towns of the colony in proportion to their tax-lists of the year 1733, the interest
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to be used for the support of their respective schools for- ever. Treasurers of this school fund were appointed in Farmington as early as 1741. To this fund in 1766 were added any sums still due the colony under the excise Act of 1758 on tea and other merchandise which the towns could collect.
The- next fund for schools was acquired in this wise. More than one hundred years before, in 1672, the town voted that a rectangular piece of land extending three miles north of Brown's Hill, two miles east of the meet- ing house, three miles south of the house of Joseph Hecock and two miles west of Round Hill, should be reserved. All other lands of the town should be divided among the eighty- four taxpayers of that year, in proportion, or nearly so, to the amount of their tax-list. This land was divided at dif- ferent times between 1721 and 1764 into thirteen grand divisions, and these, for the most part, into tiers of lots one-fourth of a mile wide, separated by four-rod highways with much wider ones occasionally thrown in. These high- ways were for the most part located where no roads were needed or over precipices or through swamps where none could be made. The attempt to use one of them in the Pine Woods resulted in its being known ever since as Folly Road. So, on the 27th of December, 1784, the town voted to sell such highways, the avails to be a perpetual fund for the support of schools. To avoid any possible illegality, the General Assembly passed an Act on the 18th day of May, 1786, validating such sales. The last sale was made October 19, 1819, since which time the courts have held any further such sales illegal. Next came the famous School Fund of Connecticut. The colony claimed under the charter of 1662 a strip of territory of the width of the present State, beginning at the west boundary of
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Pennsylvania, and extending due west to the South Sea, or later on to the Mississippi River. This the State ceded, in 1786, to the United States, reserving the small part long known as the Western Reserve, lying east of the west bounds of Erie and Huron counties in Ohio. From the sale of this Western Reserve arose the Connecticut School Fund. The next and last fund was derived from the surplus revenue in the treasury of the United States, which, by an Act of Congress passed June 23, 1836, was distributed among the several States in proportion to their representation in that body, and known as the Town De- posit Fund. Gov. Treadwell made an elaborate estimate of the probable income from the funds existing in 1799, and rejoiced in the belief that it would pay the school expenses of Farmington, and leave annually the sum of $447.84 " to be applied to the support of the gospel min- istry." On the 4th of March, 1799, therefore, the School Society appointed " Hon. Lt. Governor Treadwell, Tim- othy Pitkin, Jr., and John Mix Esquires " to petition the General Assembly, in May of that year, for liberty to use the surplus income of the funds for the support of the ministry. The General Assembly granted this request, but when, on the 5th of December, 1803, the Ecclesiastical Society applied for the money, its request was flatly re- fused. The next year there was a compromise in which the Ecclestiastical Society was allowed the money for " the instruction and practice of psalmody in said society; pro- vided nevertheless that all dissenters from the mode of worship practiced in said society shall be entitled to their rateable proportion of said monies." In 1805 and 1806 the " Gospel Ministry " secured the money, and also in 1808 when the surplus had fallen to " about 137 dollars." After this no farther attempt seems to have been made
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to divert the money from strictly educational uses. The schools were becoming more numerous and expensive. The parish of Northington claimed its share, and perhaps the distant muttering began to be heard of the storm which was soon to separate church and state forever.
The amount of the Town School Fund in 1826 was $9,090.41, and in 1881 it was $9,470.58, at which latter date the Town Deposit Fund amounted to $4,882.41.
But enough of funds and finances. Let us go back two centuries to the old log schoolhouse and consider what our forefathers studied in that little cabin. The same meeting that ordered it built voted twenty pounds for the instruc- ion of the " male children that are through their horning- book."
The horning-book, more commonly called the horn- book, consisted of a board about as big as one's hand on which was fastened a paper inscribed with the alpha- bet and usually below it the Lord's Prayer. Over all was nailed a thin sheet of translucent horn through which the boy could see the characters beneath and with his dirty fingers point out great A, little a, and so on, without soiling the clean white paper below. Shenstone says :
"Lo! now with state she utters her command ; Eftsoons the urchins to their tasks repair, Their books of stature small they take in hand, Which with pellucid horn secured are, To save from finger wet the letters fair :"
Cowper describes it as : -
" Neatly secured from being soiled or torn Beneath a pane of thin translucent horn,
A book (to please us at a tender age 'Tis called a book, though but a single page), Presents the prayer the Saviour deigned to teach,
Which children use, and parsons, - when they preach."
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The next book in course was a very small one, but was more universally read and left a more lasting impres- sion on the New England mind than any other book what- ever, the Bible alone excepted. This was the New England Primer. Primers, formerly called prymers or primary books, are among the oldest writings in our language. The Vision of Piers Plowman, written about 1362, enumerates the prymer among priestly books. The Prioress, one of the Canterbury Pilgrims whom Chaucer sets forth from the old Tabard Inn about 1386, tells of a little child "as he sate in the scole at his primere."
Henry VIII, in 1545, directs that " every schoolmaster and bringer-up of young beginners in learning, next after the A. B. C. now by us also set forth, do teach this primer or book of ordinary prayers."
These little books, containing first the doctrines and forms of the older church, then the modified forms of the Established Church of Henry and of Elizabeth, became by slow changes the chief exponent of New England Calvinism.
In December, 1645, at a court holden at New Haven, Goodwife Stolion was complained of for selling "primers at 9d apiece which cost but 4d here in New England." Nothing is certainly known of the contents of these early primers. Dr. Trumbull tells of one compiled by the Apostle Eliot in 1669 for the use of the Indians supposed to be substantially the same, the contents of which he discovers by translating from Algonkin back into English. In an " Almanack Containing an Account of the Coelestial Motions, Aspects, &c. For the year of the Christian Em- pire, 1691." It is advertised that "There is now in the Press, and will suddenly be extant, a Second Impression of the New England Primer enlarged, to which is added, more Directions for Spelling; the Prayer of K. Edward
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the 6th, and Verses made by Mr. Rogers the Martyr, left as a legacy to his Children. Sold by Benjamin Harris, at the London Coffee-House in Boston."
The earliest edition of which a complete copy is known to exist, is that of 1737. The first leaf is adorned with a wood-cut of the " Man of Sin," followed by one of King George .the Second. Then come "The Great Capital Letters," " The Small Letters," the "Easie Sylables for Children," ab eb ib, etc., leading rapidly up to A-bom-i- na-ti-on and other words of six sylables. Then comes the Alphabet adorned with cuts, beginning with the Alpha of the Puritan's faith, -
"In Adam's Fall We sinned all."
with its representations of Adam, Eve, the Apple, and the Serpent coiled around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The succeeding illustrations are worth a moment's consideration as showing the gradual change of Puritan thought. Their early maxims of prudence and morality, after the great revivals which followed the preaching of Edwards and Bellamy, for a while gave place to solemn precepts of religion, and these were in turn modified by the taste of later times. Against the letter C stood the rhyme : ---
" The Cat doth play And after slay,"
with a picture of a cat standing on her hind-legs and play- ing on a pipe.
This was discarded for the solemn utterance -
" Christ crucify'd For sinners Dy'd."
Subsequently the cat was reinstated, this time playing the fiddle and still later playing with an unlucky mouse after
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the manner of cats. Against the letter D the old rhyme " A dog will bite A thief at night,"
was dropped, and we read "The Deluge drown'd The world around ; "
but the picture of the thief with his bag of plunder and the dog hard after him taught too valuable a lesson to be lost, and the " Deluge " had at length to give place. The loyal utterance,
"Our King the good No man of blood, "
became "Proud Korah's Troop Was swallowed up,"
for which an edition of 1812 has
"'Tis Youths' Delight To fly their Kite."
For the letter O the old version had "The Royal Oak, it was the Tree That sav'd His Royal Majesty ; "
but the memory of Charles was not very dear to them and so they substituted a tribute in honor of three Old Testa- ment worthies -
" Young Obadias, David, Josias, All were pious."
The Royal Oak was at length reinstated, and finally a Hartford edition is said to have improved it into "The Charter Oak it was the Tree That saved to us our Liberty."
The solemn admonition " Time cuts down all Both great and small,"
could not hold its place against the couplet - " Young Timothy Learnt sin to fly."
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with a picture of Sin which amply justifies Timothy's flight. But Time proved too strong for Timothy and at length reappears at the top of the page with his scythe and fore- lock. There was much other matter in the New England Primer which we have no time to consider, a very learned and entertaining account of which by Dr. Trumbull may be found in the numbers of the Sunday School Times for 1882. All this matter was designed to lead the youthful mind gradually up to the contemplation of the grand end and aim of the book, The Westminster Assembly's Shorter Catechism, beginning with "What is the chief end of man," and going on through the profoundest doctrines of Calvanism. Saturday was devoted to the study of this catechism, and the minister, at stated times, examined the children upon their knowledge of its contents. As if this were not enough, the code of 1650 enjoined upon "the Selectmen of every Town . . . to see ... that all Masters of families do once a week at least catechise their children and servants in the grounds and principles of religion."
Not only was the catechism of the Westminster divines taught in the schools, but every church and town had some other favorite one adapted to their especial needs. That of the Rev. John Cotton, in very common use, was entitled " Spiritual Milk for BOSTON BABES in either England Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments for their Souls Nourishment." The Rev. Mr. Stone of Hartford wrote one for his church, and another, in the most illegible penmanship I am acquainted with, is inscribed on the first record-book of the church in Farmington. It contains such questions as, "Is original sin an exorbitation of a man's whole nature from the whole law, and actual sin the exorbitation of the action from the law?" The youth- ful mind having become familiar with the distinction be-
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tween original sin and actual sin, was next asked "Was. Adam's transgression carried on in his own person, or was it imputed to his seed?" By which time he must have been ready to exclaim in the words of the next question, " What is this . . . . original sin?" However absurd these doctrines may seem to some or hateful to others, to the God-fearing men of old they were the most terrible of realities. The remaining list of school books is a short one. The Bible was, no doubt, read, but it was not an age of Bible Societies and cheap Bibles. The word of God in every household was a costly book handed down with reverence from father to son like that of the Cotter of Burns, "The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride." Probably some cheaper edition of the New Testa- ment supplied their needs. At a later day in 1815 the overseers of public schools in Farmington adopted the fol- lowing rules concerning the use of the Bible and Cate- chism, interesting as showing the reverential and law- abiding spirit of a bygone time :
" The masters will select such lessons from the Bible for those who read therein as they can best understand; and will frequently explain and inculcate such truths in the course of reading, as lie nearest the level of their ca- pacities by occasional remarks or a more solemn address; particularly their obligations to honour and obey their parents ; to be subject to magistrates and all in authority ; to revere the ministers of the gospel; to respect the aged and all their superiors; to reverence the Sabbath, the word and worship of God; also to remind them of their de- pendence on God, of their accountability to him, of their mortality, and of the importance of religion both as a prep- aration for death, and the only means of true peace, com- fort, and usefulness in the world. On Saturdays the
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masters will teach the children the catechism before men- tioned; and it is expected that all such as go through a course of ordinary school learning, will commit the whole to memory, so as to be able promptly to answer every ques- tion therein."
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