USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 9
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with the school laws, and gradually the situation improved. But it remained a thorn in the flesh of school authorities even after two truant officers, appointed in 1886, began to pursue their duties vigorously.
Undoubtedly school attendance improved also as a result of making schoolrooms more habitable and work more in- teresting. New schoolhouses, one in 1872 in Union City with another west of the river in 1876, and three additional ones in the Center, the first built in 1873, the Rubber Avenue school in 1888, and the Oak Street school east of the river in 1890, together with rental of space in Academy Hall for another primary room, eliminated the worst of the over- crowding and enabled teachers to make the schoolrooms physically more attractive. Desks and seats in place of the benches of earlier years provided pupils with greater com- fort, while in newer buildings furnaces instead of wood stoves promised warmth in the far corners of every room. Even more attention was given to widening the fields of study and enlivening the teaching. The Board of School Visitors, soon to be dignified with the title Board of Educa- tion, in 1874 mapped out the work each department or grade should cover in a school year, beginning in the primary classes with reading and writing, and advancing through the grammar grades to geography, "primary grammar" and "intellectual arithmetic." Early in the eighties the town voted to introduce drawing and music, as well as hygiene courses to expose the perils of intoxicants, and in 1889 in the senior grammar grades classes in government and botany were added. Every schoolchild in Naugatuck now had some varied intellectual fare.
After the passage of the state law in 1886 requiring towns to supply free text books, it became easier for the Board of Education to supervise the work completed in every school. Geographies, spelling books, dictionaries, improved graded readers, music readers, Eggleston's History of the United States, later supplanted by Fiske's, algebra and geometry
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texts, and science books were all listed and orders for ap- proved texts placed with local stationers. About this time the head of the schools in the Center proposed four courses of study for the senior grammar grades, and his plan soon went into effect in most essentials. The high school courses, always fairly flexible in scope, were extended even more gen- erously than those in the lower grades, including after 1889 classes in English literature and astronomy, in addition to what had been offered for twenty years, namely, Latin, alge- bra and geometry, chemistry, and natural philosophy. In the next year new "philosophical apparatus" was acquired. Though the high school curriculum was not laid out to meet college requirements until 1896, successive principals for forty years before then aimed at offering as comprehen- sive a field of study as town finances and a limited teaching staff could contrive.
Physical education before the nineties received scant at- tention. Almost apologetically the Board of Education in 1882 alluded to a department in one school's having experi- mented with calisthenics, which "consuming but little time," appeared to invigorate the whole class. Physical culture first netted a place in 1891 when the town voted $50 to cover expenses of such work in all the schools. Divided among six districts and some twelve schools this sum can scarcely have permitted purchase of elaborate gymnastic equipment, but at least here was a beginning.
Neither well-ventilated, pleasant schoolrooms, nor inter- esting text books, nor intelligently planned courses of study, however, could make school work absorbing without good teachers. The innate gifts of Naugatuck school teachers were probably quite as great as those in neighboring communities during much of the town's early life, but as time wore on the salary scale remained so low as to make one doubt the pos- sibility of maintaining a highly competent staff. Teachers' compensation as found early in the century, $30 for a term of ten or twelve weeks, had inevitably been doubled and
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tripled as the cost of living rose, though as late as 1858 one district paid its teacher only $80, plus board, for a whole year. While the enormously greater purchasing power of money in the nineteenth century redeems the salary figures from the realm of stark penury, the School Visitors them- selves labelled salaries in the 1860's inadequate. By 1876 women received $9 a week, one male teacher $15 a week, and the principal of the high school $1,200 a year; by 1889 the rates for female teachers had been set at $8 a week mini- mum and $15 maximum.
Regardless of salary rates, the Board of Education hoped to improve the caliber of Naugatuck's teachers by making more rigorous its examinations preliminary to certifying them. Substitution of written examinations for oral, fol- lowed a few years later by re-examination of all teachers in the school system, may have had the desired effect of push- ing elderly, unenterprising schoolma'ams on to greater ex- ertions to keep abreast of their profession. But it seems more probable that a surer road to good teaching lay in relieving the overburdened by reducing the number of children any one teacher must handle. Where one primary grade teacher had 107 pupils assigned her, the task was patently beyond the powers of any individual to cope with satisfactorily. Fif- teen teachers for over 800 children enrolled might not seem painfully few, until we remember that the four outly- ing district schools had relatively small numbers registered, so that the burden in the Center and in Union City came closer to being seventy pupils per teacher than fifty. This situation, true in 1881 and 1882 when Naugatuck was grow- ing rapidly, obviously could not be allowed to endure, and more teachers were hired as additional schoolrooms were built. Yet even in 1891 primary grade teachers had classes so big that it was virtually impossible to give each child the individual attention it needed. The miracle is that school work was even fair.
The cost of running the schools was a constant factor in
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determining what the town was willing to undertake. As was true in every manufacturing town, the growth in school population tended to outstrip the financial resources. Most of the increase in population was among the working classes, not the well-to-do, so that the weight of taxation, if it kept pace with the increase in numbers, must rest heavily upon the wealthier people. Complaints about the expensiveness of the school system, therefore, were as frequent as objections to its shortcomings in program.
Costs did not rise steadily, as some years expenditures for schoolhouses and equipment were much higher than in other years. But the trend was upward, from $2,281 in 1857 to $7,153 twenty years later, not counting in 1877 about $2,300 received from the state. In 1885 the town spent $9,080 on its schools but ran into a snag with the Center District com- mittee who at first refused to allot funds for an additional primary grade room, dubbed as unnecessary extravagance. By 1890 town school charges mounted to $12,630 and by 1892-93 were set at over $17,000. The Board of Education endeavored to prove that costs of schooling per child were not rising unduly, in 1880-81 $8.17 per child enumerated as compared to $7.52 the following year, and $16.46 in terms of average attendance compared to $15.07 for 1881-82, and $14.14 in 1882-83. Figures of big cities for 1881-82 showed Naugatuck's expenses were moderate, for while New York City gave $10.35 per child and Philadelphia $12.90, Chi- cago's costs ran to $18.57 and Cincinnati's to $23.91. Com- parative analyses of the quality of education offered was of course not made. In 1891 Naugatuck's cost per child enu- merated stood at $10.55. It became a matter of convincing town voters of the 1880's and go's that money spent on schools was a wise investment, no matter what the bills for any one year might be.
Just as attitudes about civic affairs gradually altered, so the simple social life of the country town in the course of these fifty years gave way little by little to a more sophisti-
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cated pattern. The changes were naturally slow to evolve, and Naugatuck in 1875 in many respects would have ap- peared little different from Naugatuck in 1844. New houses and additional factories and stores made the center and Union City slightly more urban, while better roads and more horse-drawn buggies eased communication within the township, and the railroad line along the river bank brought Waterbury and Seymour and the Sound into relatively close reach. Yet Naugatuck till nearly the end of the nineteenth century remained in its points of view a self-sufficient, in- dependent New England town. The church continued to be the directing force and though a man might err from Chris- tian duty during the week, might enter the local saloons, or drive a hard bargain in his business dealings in fashion to make us today question the depth of his brotherly love for his fellows, when the Sabbath came, everyone, man, woman, and child, as a matter of course set off to meeting, to Episcopal or Methodist service, or to Roman Catholic Mass. For many years after midcentury townspeople knew they could set their watches by the moment on a Sunday morning when Deacon Samuel Hopkins drove by to meeting.
The Congregational church, between 1845 and 1849 shrunk to the thirty-three members, took a new lease on life with the coming of the Reverend Charles Sherman as pastor, and by 1876 numbered 216. A few revisions of the Confes- sion of Faith, the Covenant, and the "Rules," published in 1851, adapted the basic principles of faith and church gov- ernance more closely to views now acceptable to its older members and to newcomers, and the building of a new church edifice in 1855 bound the members together by new financial responsibilities. Subscriptions for the costly new building were generous: $50 to $500 a year for five years, in days when $800 was considered a good salary. The minister's salary, to be sure, before 1870 was supplemented by a "dona- tion." The two-day festival of the donation of fire wood, potatoes and other vegetables, hams, spare ribs, butter,
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cheese, eggs, preserves, and pies was the great social occasion of the year. Older people gathered at the parsonage for the afternoon and supper, the young folks arriving in the eve- ning for refreshments of doughnuts and cakes and for games of Authors or Blind Man's Buff. The next day was the chil- dren's turn. Charles S. Sherman, described by Eliza Ward, one of his small parishioners, as having the awesome mien of an Old Testament prophet, inspired in his congregation a loyalty and devotion that enabled him in the twenty years of his pastorate greatly to strengthen the church. Early in the fifties the church adopted "the systematic benevolent contri- bution plan" for gifts to foreign and home missions, min- isters' aid, college and education societies, and similar funds, while maintaining contributions for relieving the needy in Naugatuck itself. Here is clear evidence of the wider vision the Congregational church was achieving.
Mr. Sherman's successors of the next twenty-five years had firm support in the Society and so could broaden the scope of church activities to meet the more varied demands of a growing, diversifying community. Social gatherings directed by the Young People's Society and the Ladies' Aid increased in frequency, while the Sunday School picnic came to be the Red Letter Day of all the children of the parish. Many people living today remember with nostalgia the trips by train down to High Rock for boating and roller skating or other outdoor amusements. In 1886 a new pastor, the Reverend W. B. Blackman, started a monthly parish paper, The Parish Bulletin, which, by carrying news both of the Naugatuck church projects and of what was going on in other places, welded the congregation into still greater unity. Two years later a Parish House, built facing the green, pro- vided a social center for young and old, with the express intent of having it serve all the community, of whatever reli- gious denomination. The "gentlemen's parlor" and the read- ing room housing the parish library and the new Howard Whittemore Memorial Library were open every evening for
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use of anyone in the town. In the well-equipped building the Parish House Association maintained lecture and con- cert courses every winter and developed an extensive educa- tional program. Thus in the nineties church sociables and church worship were still the very core of social as well as spiritual life.
Similarly St. Michael's grew in strength. Communicants increased until toward the end of the century they out- numbered the Congregationalists. A rectory built in 1860 adjacent to the church added comfort to the life of the rector and dignity to the appearance of the village. Since by 1875 a larger church was manifestly needed, a new, modernized Gothic, stone-trimmed brick church went up on the old site, and the first building was sold to the School Board and moved back of the green for a schoolhouse. Under the guid- ance of a succession of genial rectors parish activities flow- ered: a Young People's Society was launched, a church school opened, and women's societies, like the Guild and the Church Helpers, took charge of social events and good works. On Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, the great church holi- days, St. Michael's celebrated with festivities that once upon a time would have outraged the Connecticut Puritan.
Meanwhile Methodism also expanded in Naugatuck. Early in the 1840's the Methodist Episcopal Conference had recognized the "class" in the village as big enough to warrant its inclusion in an itinerary of a circuit rider, but no settled pastor came until 1849. Two years later the Reverend W. H. Bangs supervised the erection of a small frame church on Water Street, where the congregation met for the next seven- teen years. In 1868 the building was moved to the southeast corner of Maple and Church Streets and served till the ex- panding congregation outgrew it and erected a larger church in a quieter part of town. In both churches a space to the left of the pulpit was reserved for the church elders, from which, the "Amen Corner," every Sunday the elders loudly cried out to punctuate the sermons with energetic "Amens,"
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"Glory hallelujahs" and "Praise the Lord." Perhaps more vigorously intent than any other one church group in Nauga- tuck of these years upon direction of the social life of their flock, the Methodists included in their newest church space not only for a "Lecture Room" but for a diningroom and kitchen too. Church suppers and meetings could now be held immediately under the eyes of the watchful elders.
A Union Chapel in Straitsville in midcentury, in the 1870's a mission in Union City, used mainly for a Sunday School but also available for preaching services of various denominations, and in 1890 a Swedish Lutheran chapel supplemented the three larger Protestant churches. Baptists and others strongly attached to their own special form of worship leased one chapel or the other.
But the most notable change in Naugatuck's church life came with the growth of its Roman Catholic population. As Irish Catholics settled in the town, the wish to have a mission here took shape. Masses, said first in the house of Patrick Conran about 1850, were attended by more and more fami- lies until it was possible to build a small mission church on Water Street where priests of neighboring parishes regularly celebrated the Mass. Year by year the mission grew and in 1866 the Bishop of Connecticut created St. Francis parish here. While the physical property of St. Francis was steadily enlarged, first by purchase of a rectory and site for a church, and then in 1890 by the completion of an imposing Gothic church, still more remarkable was the development of the parish in other respects. Some 160 families in 1876 were in- creased to 500 by 1890. Devout Catholic families gave not only liberal financial support, but by their behavior built up the good name of Roman Catholicism in this erstwhile Puritan community to a point where Protestants also were moved to contribute to the building fund. At the laying of the cornerstone of the new church in 1882 the largest crowd of people ever seen in Naugatuck gathered to witness the ceremonies. It took eight years to finance and finish the build-
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ing and the great bell tower, modelled upon St. Gertrude's in Louvain, Belgium, but, when completed, church and lofty tower dominating North Church Street gave visual evidence to the whole countryside of the strength of St. Francis par- ish.
To a degree perhaps unique in New England towns, rela- tions between Yankee or foreign-born Protestants and Catho- lics in Naugatuck were from the outset harmonious. A brief period in 1854 saw the Know-Nothings in evidence, but apparently the adherents of the party were swayed by polit- ical, not religious convictions. Some of the old families of the town, it is true, tended to look down their noses at for- eigners, but this attitude of superiority to all newcomers was mostly confined to householders who had little contact with the manufacturing interests. Hostility to Catholicism which cropped up in many mill towns of New England never took root here. Such was the rapport between people of the two faiths that the town voted to fence the Catholic cemetery just as it did the town burial grounds, a generosity unheard of in other places.
Possibly the sterling qualities of the Catholic people them- selves was responsible for this unusual tolerance. Beyond doubt the grace and tact of the priests assigned to the parish was contributory. They considered themselves members of the community as well as Catholic priests, and gave thought and energy to promoting many useful civic enterprises. Father Brady, Father O'Gorman, and Father Fagan, one after the other, served upon the Board of School Visitors, each in turn giving wise counsel and much attention. Timely comments from Father Fagan, when he acted as Secretary of the Board, stressed the wisdom of offering the best possible schooling to all children, irrespective of nationality or reli- gious faith, a policy which other members of the Board sup- ported warmly. An illustration of the skill and common sense with which Naugatuck's priests handled potential contro- versies was the settling of an issue in 1877 occasioned by the
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protest of Catholic parents in Union City at having their children expected to join in the short religious service with which school sessions were then daily opened. Father Fagan discussed the matter in friendly spirit with the other mem- bers of the School Board, consulted with the State Secretary of Education, and then arranged to have the obligatory service dropped. No one was offended, and Father Fagan became an increasingly influential person in Naugatuck. Catholic priests and Protestant pastors maintained always a mutually co-operative attitude, as admirable as it was rare. Where such an atmosphere existed neither outright bigotry nor petty fault-finding could grow.
The Catholic church, like every well-defined group in Naugatuck, soon began to organize some forms of secular social life. The Young Men's Catholic Institute, started in 1871, attempted to put at the disposal of young men of that faith means of wholesome diversion and self-improvement. A library in the Nichols Block supplied books, and here members gathered once a week for some years. Two distinct Masonic lodges, a branch of the Ancient Order of Hiber- nians, a lodge of the Ancient Order of Foresters, and one of the Knights of Pythias also found place. A chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows and a branch of the Eastern Star add to the evidence that Naugatuck by the 1880's was conforming to the general American scheme of organiza- tion of social intercourse. Yet it is probable that this foster- ing of societies was due less to acceptance of a formula than to tacit recognition of the fact that through these groups new- comers without established ties in a growing community could most readily make a place for themselves. Joining a fraternal order as well as a church was a means of making friends and forming enduring connections. Though a town grown from 2,800 in 1870 to 6,200 in 1890 was still small enough to make neighborliness a matter of course, the aids given by organized societies were rightly made the most of.
Occupying a somewhat special place was the Isbell post of
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the Grand Army of the Republic. Formed in 1874, and named in memory of Lt. John D. Isbell, a gay-spirited, much- loved young volunteer who died at Harrison's Landing in the summer of 1862, the Isbell post claimed at one time seventy-five members. The veterans were a close-knit group with no political axes to grind, but anxious to have a memo- rial to their comrades who had died in the service. The Soldier's Monument on the green was the outcome. Through private subscription and town funds money was raised, and in a moving ceremony on Decoration Day, 1885, the monu- ment was unveiled. Not untypical of Civil War monuments all through New England, Naugatuck's granite soldier, stand- ing at ease on his column, represented the grief and the gratitude of the whole town. Familiar as we are today with photographs from the jungles of the Pacific of soldiers and sailors of World War II, to us the beard and mustache of the Civil War boy no longer seem strange; the touching youth- fulness and profound seriousness of the staid figure emerge from the stone. The parade and the dedicatory services marked a great day in Naugatuck. Several thousand visitors attended the exercises and were fed afterward by a committee of townspeople in a large tent put up in the field beside the school green. But the significance of the occasion lay in its being a community-wide affair in preparation for which everyone could share by gift of money or service. It was the first time that the whole town undertook an enterprise fi- nanced and carried out not by a few, but by all.
In spite of the increasing number of festivities arranged by the churches or fraternal societies, family life and family parties all through these years were only less important than early in the century. But more leisure brought about many changes. The hours spent in filling woodboxes, dipping candles or cleaning oil lamps, pumping water, making soap, and turning out by hand most articles of clothing for the family were freed for other work or for play, as coal for fuel, gas or electric lights, water piped into the houses, store soap,
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and some ready-made clothing became commonplaces. In the early nineties by no means every family could afford the luxury of all these labor-saving devices, but there were few households, if any, that did not benefit by some. The dress- maker went the rounds spring and fall to make children's and women's clothes for the year, but men's clothes were readily bought from Naugatuck merchants. Grocery stores and meat markets or local meat and fish peddlers simplified feeding the family, and gradually the households where the farm supplemented the income from shop and factory be- came the exception rather than the rule. This releasing of time from the sheer mechanics of living meant opportunity for reading the books accumulating in the libraries and evenings of leisure for meetings and parties, while the rail- road brought within reach the pleasures of a day at the sea- shore or the excitement of attending a performance of Ed- win Booth or Joseph Jefferson at the theatre in Waterbury.
Children's amusements differed less from those of earlier years than did their elders'. The enchantment of hillside, river, and mountain brook remained even after new factories in both Waterbury and Naugatuck with their industrial ref- use and sewage began to transform the "raging Naugatuck" into a mill river and destroy favorite haunts of boys and girls. Older boys played ball by the school on the village green with a rubber ball, such as perhaps only the "Rubber Town" could have supplied, while small boys, perched as "Jack on the Fence" to chase balls into the Episcopal church yard or across Church Street, watched admiringly, with the promise of a turn at bat as reward for acting as retrievers. On rainy days schoolchildren in the center gathered at recess in the Congregational church horsesheds, a fascinating ren- dezvous, and every day lined up at the old well for a drink out of the iron cup chained to its side. Apart from the les- sening of drudgery at home, for children Naugatuck in 1892 was little different from Naugatuck in 1844.
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