USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Milton > History of Milton > Part 8
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1. From 1634 until 1662 Milton was part of Dorchester, and would have used Dorchester schools. During this period Dorchester seems to have had no school anywhere near the settle- ment at Unquity, nor have I been able to find any Dorchester record which concerns schooling for the Milton region.
2. Harvard entrance requirements, beyond good moral character, were solely Latin and Greek as late as 1775. At some unknown date between then and 1821 geography and fundamental arithmetic were added.
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History of Milton
During the first 38 years of the Town's existence this requirement was prob- ably met largely by home instruction, and there is some reason to believe that the minister may also have acted as schoolteacher. Rev. Peter Thacher's diary entry for 21 October 1680 records his agreeing to teach a boy to write, and an earlier minister-Rev. Thomas Migill-is known to have taught the children, but this may have been only in religious matters.
We are apt to think of school and schoolhouse as one and the same, but as late as the time of the Revolution we find rooms for school purposes being rented by the Milton Selectmen. We know that the Town had two schools in 1700 with Ebenezer Clapp as schoolmaster in the west end of town, and Thomas Vose, the Town Clerk, master at the east end, and we also know that there was no schoolhouse, unless the old meeting house on Adams Street at Churchill's Lane was being used for one. There is an apparently well substantiated tradition that this first church building was once so used, and such was customary elsewhere.
In 1712 the Town voted to build a school, but nothing happened. This is not unusual, for the early records show a surprising number of cases where the Town voted action, and that was the end of the matter. By 1721, how- ever, we find two schoolhouses, one at Churchill's Lane and Adams Street (probably the old Meeting House refurbished), the other on Brush Hill Road, a little south of present Metropolitan Avenue and on the west side of the road. These two schools were taught by the same schoolmaster on a ro- tating or "moving" basis. "Moving" schools, as opposed to fixed, were very common in the 1700's. A school might keep for three or six months in one schoolhouse, or in a room hired in a private home, then move on elsewhere for another three months, and so on around the circuit. In some towns it took a "moving" school as much as three years to complete its round. Such a school allowed the economy of a single schoolteacher, but it meant little schooling and long vacations. I cannot determine whether or not it was us- ual for the pupils to follow the Milton school as it moved. In some towns it was done, in others forbidden. In January 1734-35 the Town changed its mind, and decreed a single fixed school "in the center of the Town on Meet- ing House Road, ... between the stone bridge and the pound". Meeting
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The Schools
House Road is certainly Canton Avenue, on which the pound was located, the one of this period being nearly opposite 730 Canton Avenue. If we assume the "stone bridge" to have been over Pine Tree Brook at the head of Blue Hills Parkway,3 we would then get a school location very near the ex- act center of the town, and one which would not be over a 21/2 mile walk for any child. I can find no record or tradition of a schoolhouse along this part of Canton Avenue, yet the Town Meeting records for the period 1735-63 very clearly indicate that there was a single central school. Between 1755 and 1757 various unsuccessful attempts were made to re-establish a "mov- ing" school. In 1763 the Town decided on three schools, one at each end of the town as well as that one already existing in the middle, and the follow- ing year voted to hire quarters rather than to build. It would seem that nothing was done until 1768 when a schoolhouse was built on Churchill's Lane opposite the cemetery, another on Canton Avenue a little south of Atherton Street, and a third, sixteen by twenty feet in size, in Scotch Woods at the easterly end of Harland Street. In 1769 we find a reference as to what should be "done to the old school house", which one we do not know.
The Massachusetts law still required a grammar school for a town of 100 families, and Milton reached this size some time shortly before 1760 so far as can be estimated. It was essentially a farming community of no great wealth, and the inhabitants would not have been much concerned with a school preparing for Harvard. In 1768 we find the Town considering the question of how the grammar school should be kept.4 The previous schools had all been reading and writing schools for the boys. The girls, if they went at all, were concerned only with reading.
Throughout these years there had been another kind of school of which
3. This is a somewhat dubious assumption, as there is reason to believe that this bridge was built of wood. No other bridge, however, seems to meet the requirements.
4. In 1728 the Selectmen were directed to provide a grammar school, but there is no further mention of it until 1768. After this date there are several references to the grammar school, so it can be presumed established at about this time. The legal requirement could be mnet by having a schoolinaster capable of teaching Latin and Greek, should any pupil appear and request it. Thus a grammar school might at some periods be potential rather than actual and yet meet the re- quirements of the law. When actually kept, it might really consist only of a boy or two sitting in the regular schoolhouse and working on their classics under the regular schoolmaster.
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History of Milton
few Milton records remain. The dame school was originally privately oper- ated, and designed perhaps as much to keep small children out from under foot as to teach them. Sometimes a town supported a dame school partially and sometimes entirely. There is but a single early Town record of a dame school in Milton, in 1728, and none thereafter until 1800. It is evident from Rev. Peter Thacher's diary that there was one in Milton in 1684. The usual arrangement was for children to enter at three or four years of age and to re- main until they were about six, at which time they could read words of two syllables and were thus qualified to enter the schoolmaster's reading and writing school. Much of the school day was spent wriggling on a bench with nothing to do except about twenty minutes of actual instruction morning and afternoon. After their lessons the children were often put to little chores to keep them busy, such as shelling beans and similar jobs. A Mrs. Liver- more, who went to a Boston dame school in the early 1800's, remembered being sent daily to the grocery store to fetch the teacher her morning "shot" of rum.
The girls seldom went beyond the dame school in those days, although by the end of the eighteenth century we find their attendance at the reading and writing schools becoming quite general. There were many small private schools throughout New England where girls could obtain a good educa- tion, but these were only for the daughters of the well-to-do. The average boy was supposed to read and write, and, as time went on, also to cipher simple sums, but a girl need only read and sew. Rachel Smith (1735-1821), wife of Daniel Vose, a prosperous Milton merchant, and daughter of the lo- cal paper-mill owner, had to sign her name with a cross.
The schools of the eighteenth century were free in that they were open to all, but some charge to the pupil was always involved. In Milton the basic cost of the schools seems to have been borne entirely by the Town after 1712. Many other towns exacted small fees from the parents of the pupils, or assessed those using the schools for their support, but Milton appears to have required only the furnishing of firewood by the pupils-a standard re- quirement in all early schools. Schoolbooks and paper were supplied by the pupils, for the slate did not come in until about the time of the Revolution.
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The Schools
It was not until a State law passed in 1884 required provision of schoolbooks by the municipality that schools became really free.
The schoolmaster in those days was not overpaid,5 and he worked for what he got. His position was an honored one, second only to the minister, but his pay seems to have usually been in the order of one-third to at most one-half that of the minister, and largely in "country pay"-corn meal, pumpkins, wool and such. He probably saw very little hard money. He worked throughout the year for long hours six days a week, and was often expected to assist in church on the Sabbath. Hingham in 1791 allowed the schoolmaster four days a year for his vacation, but also generously included a whole extra day to attend Town Meeting, and two days for militia duty, as well as another day here and there. Salem in 1770 gave theirs no vacation at all, but allowed him the balance of the week after Harvard Commencement -probably, one is prone to assume, in which to sober up after drowning his sorrows at his class reunion.
A grammar-school master, of necessity, had to be a college graduate, and teaching was often taken up for a year or two by a young minister to fill in until he could get a parish. Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration of Independence for Connecticut, taught in Milton schools as a young man, as did Rev. Jeremy Belknap, the Boston minister who founded the Massachu- setts Historical Society. The reading and writing schoolmaster did not of course have to be a college man, but he enjoyed a position of repute in the community. Often the master was boarded around as part of his pay, and he probably did not always fare too well. I find one teacher referring in disgust to the ""squn" he knew he would get too much of-pork liver, sweetbreads, kidneys and other bits of offal all fried up together.
At the start of the Revolution we find the Town maintaining three schools and the grammar school, but in about 1778 the East School near the Bury- ing Place burned. The next few years apparently produced an acrimonious dispute as to where the East School should be rebuilt. The Town Records bring down to us only the bare bones of the votes, but from the various re-
5. In 1727 John Dickerman was hired to keep a reading and writing school at £30 a year. At this same date the Rev. Peter Thacher was getting £110.
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History of Milton
versals of votes it is evident that the Town Meeting entered into the spirit of the occasion and had a good time for itself during this period. This school, twenty by twenty-four feet, apparently was at last built in 1791 near the "Liberty Pole",6 and the site was at the easterly edge of Hutchinson's Field on Adams Street-a logical place for a liberty pole, the top of the steep vil- lage hill. In 1793 there were four schools-Hutchinson's Field, Brush Hill, Middle Street (Canton Avenue), and Scotch Woods, as well as a grammar school at some unknown location.
From the earliest days the schools were a responsibility delegated by the Town to the Selectmen. Year after year we find the Selectmen exercising full control over the schools, sometimes assisted (or hindered) by specific votes of the Town. Suddenly in 1764 a new idea appears. Town Meeting this year appointed a committee to "see what is best to be done relating to schooling ... " This committee reported at the May meeting following, but the records are silent as to just what was said. It must, however, have been concerned with building schoolhouses, for the July 1764 meeting refused to reconsider a vote of this nature made in May. At the same time the Select- men were again directed to manage the schools. A similar committee was re- sorted to in 1767, and in 1779; then after a lapse of years this committee was appointed every year from 1782 until 1787. Here is the genesis of the Milton School Committee, a body which had appeared in Dorchester as early as 1645, but was a new development here. In 1790 this committee was again appointed, and in April of that year they came in with momentous recom- mendations.
The outlying districts of any town usually felt unhappy over the schools, believing that they were operated primarily by the center of population for its own convenience (this was probably only too true), and that their child- ren were forced to walk too far. In 1755 we find Milton Town Meeting vot- ing against allowing one part of the Town to be relieved from the school as- sessment so that it could furnish its own school. The "moving" school was
6. In 1778 the vote said "near the Liberty Pole"; before the school was finally built it was "where the Liberty Pole lately stood".
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The Schools
an attempt to overcome the dissatisfaction of the outskirts of the town, but it did not succeed. The long argument continued over the years, as is shown by Milton's various votes for and against "moving schools", fixed schools, and schools at certain specific locations. This problem was, of course, com- mon to all country towns, and finally resulted in the Massachusetts law of 1789, which allowed a town to break itself up into separate school districts, each run by its own district committee. These later developed into the Pru- dential Committees.7 The 1789 law is not entirely clear as to just how far the decentralization and delegation of powers could go, but subsequent laws broadened and clarified the matter. In Milton the Town voted the school budget and apportioned it among the districts, which then spent it as they saw fit. In some towns the delegation of power went further, and we find there the genesis of today's Middle West school district-a self-operating and taxing authority with no relationship to town or county. Milton, how- ever, always kept the purse strings in the hands of Town Meeting.
In the April meeting of 1790 the committee appointed the month before recommended action under the 1789 law, and the Town so voted. The man- agement of the schools, in all except the total amount to be spent, thus pass- ed out of the control of the Town and into the hands of the four school dis- tricts for better or for worse. It turned out to be for the worse.
We have now come to a good point to pause and learn a little of what these schools taught and how they went about it. Unfortunately this can be sum- marized by the statement that they did not teach very much, and that the little which they did was perhaps not too well taught. On the other hand, these reading and writing schools during the 1700's were turning out boys that could read, write and do simple sums. In an illiterate world this was a very material accomplishment.8 The schoolhouse was a plain one-room building, in winter overheated at one end by a fireplace, and the opposite end as cold as charity. Iron stoves started to come in after the Revolution,
7. The Milton Prudential Committees, oddly enough, each appear to have consisted of only one man.
8. Studies have shown that some 95% of Massachusetts men of the 1700's could at least sign their names.
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History of Milton
but the hot air furnace was still a luxury in 1850. The children sat and fidg- eted on crude benches from seven in the morning until five in the evening, with an hour or so out at noon, while during the winter months the day was shortened an hour at each end. Much time was wasted. An average half- day's work might consist of writing one page in a copy book and doing a few simple sums. Much stress was put on reading loud and fast. One teacher's favorite remark was "Speak up there. Don't read like a mouse in [side] a cheese." Schools of course varied greatly with individual teachers, despite visitations by Selectmen and committees of citizens, but in too many cases the pupils "dawdled the long day through" and accomplished very little. Discipline was demanded and obtained. One of the rules under which the Dorchester school operated in 1645 stated: "And because the rodd of cor- rection is an ordinance of God necessary sometymes to bee dispensed unto children ... therefor ... the schoolemaster ... shall have full power to min- ister correction ... " In addition to flogging with a birch switch, spanking with a leather strap, and hitting the hands with a ruler, we find mention of standing with one's nose wedged into the end of a split sapling.
I can learn almost nothing about the grammar school in Milton, but be- lieve that it may never have existed as a separate entity. In 1785 it moved through three of the school districts and probably actually was merely a separate class in the reading and writing schools. In this year the settlement at Scotch Woods was allowed to keep its own school, and was excused from paying its share of the expense of the grammar school. Scotch Woods was, however, allowed to send its Latin scholars to the West School only when the grammar school had moved there in the course of its circuit. We also find that the Town supplied only the grammar school with its firewood. Mil- ton was a farming town of no great wealth, and it is very unlikely that many boys would have wished to prepare for college or for the business world. If the grammar school began in 1768, the first college graduate to complete an education started at that time might have finished college some eight to ten years later, or in 1776-78. From the earlier of these dates until 1812 there were just ten Milton graduates of Harvard, or one every 3.6 years. Even if some of the pupils never went on to college, some flunked out, or were so
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The Schools
misguided as to go to Yale, it is obvious that the load on the Milton grammar school system was not very onerous. After 1786 there is no further mention of the grammar school. The 1789 law lowered the requirements for such a school, which exempted Milton from the necessity of keeping one.
By the end of the 1700's, when prosperity was returning and the popula- tion fast increasing, there was generally no real opportunity for those who wished to advance beyond the three R's, but could not afford the cost of ed- ucation offered by the rapidly growing number of small private schools. The ""academy" was the new development which made the higher education more generally available. A few, such as Dummer, had been established by private endowment, but the typical academy of the period was a state-char- tered and partially subsidized institution which, in effect, served as a county high school. Such was Milton Academy when first established.
Before further considering Milton Academy and the development of sec- ondary education in the Town, it seems best to continue with the primary schools. In 1793 schools were operated in four wards or districts, and the wards were empowered each to elect their own committee to hire the teach- ers and buy the firewood. It is not clear whether those committees had other duties as well, or whether the Selectmen continued their general supervis- ion. Next year's Town Meeting voted against a "woman's school" being es- tablished in the middle of the Town. In 1801 we find a vote of $666 to be ap- portioned among the school districts, and spent by them as in previous years, with an additional $30 for the Center School, to be spent under the control of the Selectmen. Evidently district management was not entirely to be trusted. Little of importance appears in the records for the next few years, but in 1810 a committee was appointed to consider the need for a free grammar school, and that seems to have been the end of the matter. This, of course, meant consideration of establishing a competitor to the Academy, now in operation for three years. In 1812 the two west wards were joined, and we find a most interesting vote of the Town which gave $100 to assist the new West School District in building a schoolhouse. Thus the school is now built by the district, either through donations or by an assessed school tax paid by inhabitants of the district only. Here we have practically com-
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History of Milton
plete decentralization. This was the "Old Brick" schoolhouse which stood on Blue Hill Avenue at Atherton Street and lasted until 1870.
By the late 1700's there was a growing demand for more schooling for the girls. I have not been able to find any specific record of this in Milton, but it was general elsewhere. In Medford, for instance, in 1766 the schoolmaster was to instruct the girls for two hours after the boys were dismissed, while in Dorchester in 1784 those girls who could read were allowed to attend the grammar school during the summer and fall months. Plymouth in 1793 had considerable discussion regarding a "female school", and the remarks of one opponent have fortunately been preserved for us. "The World has come to a pretty pass when wives and daughters would look over the shoulders of husbands and fathers and offer to correct . . . spelling ... " A few years later we find that the education of girls was on nearly the same basis as that of boys, and by 1820 it was on equal footing in primary and secondary schools.
In 1808 Town Meeting was petitioned to establish a new school district at the Center, but it was not until twenty-five years later that this district, or "ward" as they were called in Milton, was authorized. The Town Meeting record of 1824 gives us our first glimpse of the curriculum then in force : "Orthography, reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, geography, and good behavior". This represents real progress beyond the reading and writing and perhaps a little arithmetic of fifty years before.
The year 1826 brings the establishment of Milton's first formal school committee, but the record says nothing at all about its duties and powers, or its relationship with the existing district committees. In 1835 the Town was redistricted into five wards, all essentially of equal size based on pupil popu- lation, and we find the Town contributing $150 to two of the new districts to assist them in building their school buildings. Four years later the Pru- dential Committees of the districts were empowered to select and contract with their teachers, something that they had been doing right along any- way. In 1893 the School Committee's annual report appears in the Town Meeting record for the first time, and from what it says and suggests we can obtain a fairly clear picture of the Committee's powers and duties in those days. We learn that school was kept in all five districts both summer and
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"THE OLD BRICK" This schoolhouse was built in 1812 at Blue Hill Avenue and Atherton Street and torn down in 1870.
The Schools
winter, and that there were a total of 398 pupils, with slightly more boys than girls. The committee met with the Prudential Committees and teach- ers and attempted to secure agreement among them as to the schoolbooks to be used, purchased a supply of the books selected, and sold them to the pu- pils. In two or three cases they supplied children with these books without charge, and billed the Town for the cost. Finally they visited all schools at intervals throughout the year, usually working as subcommittees. The School Committee of those days thus appears to have been solely an advisory committee, examining the schools and reporting on them to the Town, with the single administrative duty of providing schoolbooks for sale to the pupils.
Let us now return and again take up the secondary schools where we left them at the end of the eighteenth century. By this time higher education was broadening beyond the basic Latin and Greek of the earlier days, wealth was increasing, and a need was arising for a school which could replace the old grammar school and prepare for college, and also act as a final finishing school for those who, while not destined for college, desired more education than that of the three R's alone. The school that developed to meet this need was the "academy", merely another name for what today we call the high school. In the 1790's Dummer and the two Phillips Academies were in existence, along with a number of others which were started in 1791-93, but various communities in the state still lacked such schools. Nathan Dane was convinced that schools of this sort should be available to all, and due very largely to his efforts the Legislature passed an act which provided for the establishment of academies in six Massachusetts counties, one of which was Norfolk. A town, in order to secure the county academy, must first raise $3000 locally before it could be considered; then, if it should be selected, its academy would be chartered and endowed by the State with half a township of Maine land. Several Norfolk towns put in their claims for the school, but a legislative committee finally selected Milton, and in 1798 the Academy was chartered, and Edward H. Robbins elected President.
Originally it had been planned to locate the new school near the Village on land offered by Mr. Robbins, but it was finally decided to build in the vi- cinity of the Meeting House, and land was bought there. For the next eight
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