USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 54
USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 54
USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 54
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that class of events which may happen once but are not capable of being repeated. Coiled up in this institution, as in a spring, there is a vigor whose uncoiling may wheel the spheres."
In the winter of 1824-25, a series of articles was printed in the "Boston Patriot" over the signature of "Franklin." In one of these articles appeared the opinion: "The first step toward a reform in our system of popular education, is the scientific preparation of teachers for the free schools. And the only measure that will insure to the public the attainment of the object, is to establish an institution for the very pur- pose." The articles set forth the leading features of an institution for the training of teachers, under expert supervision and instruction. The writer was James G. Carter, of Lancaster. Public interest began to be aroused.
Rev. Charles Brooks, of Hingham, was among the enthusiasts, es- pecially after he had taken a trip to Europe and investigated the Prus- sian system of normal schools. He appeared before the General Court of Massachusetts and gave addresses in most of the Plymouth County towns and elsewhere in the State, in advocacy of a normal school. He hoped it might be established in Plymouth County, in which the cause of popular education had its beginning. He carried on an editorial campaign twelve years before the Legislative Act creating the Board of Education was passed. Hon. Horace Mann was chosen secretary of the new board. The act creating the State board was signed by Governor Edward Everett, April 20, 1837. The board, at its second annual meeting, May 30, 1838, voted to establish a normal school in Plymouth County, as soon as suitable buildings, fixtures and furniture should be provided and placed under the control of the board. It was the intention to provide for the accommodation of one hundred pupils.
Hon. Artemas Hale, of Bridgewater, was made president of a board of five trustees. A public hearing was given to consider the claims of Plymouth, Middleboro and Bridgewater for proposed location, and the board voted May 20, 1840, "that the school be established in Bridgewater for the term of three years, on condition that 'the people of the town put the town house in a suitable condition for the use of the school ; that they place at the disposal of the visitors of the school the sum of five hundred dollars, to be expended in procuring a library and apparatus ; and that they give reasonable assurance that the scholars shall be accommodated with board within a suitable distance, at an expense not exceeding two dollars a week."
The first principal was Nicholas Tillinghast, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and with six years' experience as instructor in natural science and ethics in that academy. He was a native of Taunton. Under his direction, the school opened September 9, 1840, with twenty-eight pupils, seven men and twenty-one women,
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in the Town Hall, which had been rebuilt in some ways for the purpose and with a certain amount of equipment.
The experiment proved a success and the Board of Education, in 1845, appropriated $2,500 for the school building in Plymouth County, provided the same amount should be raised by individuals. The town of Bridgewater appropriated two thousand dollars, individuals con- tributed seven hundred dollars and Hon. Horace Mann advanced seven hundred dollars to furnish the required sum to complete the building. It was erected on a lot contributed by Colonel Abram Washburn, of Bridgewater, consisting of one and one-quarter acres of land at the corner of School and Summer streets. George B. Emerson, of Boston, contributed the heating plant. At the dedicatory exercises, August 19, 1846, Governor George N. Briggs, of the Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts, Hon. William G. Bates, of Westfield, and Amasa Walker, of Brookfield, gave addresses. Mr. Tillinghast continued as principal thirteen years, being obliged to relinquish his duties at that time on account of illness.
His successor was Marshall Conant, who was recommended for the position by Mr. Tillinghast. Mr. Conant was born at Pomfret, Ver- mont, and taught his first school in his native town. He was greatly interested in mathematics and astronomy. When twenty-three years of age, he attempted the usual mathematical calculations of an eclipse of the moon, with the help of a quadrant which he extemporized for the occasion and a clock which he had made with his own hands to keep the time. He had the satisfaction of reaching the true results, and this was characteristic of him in all his efforts in life.
For several years he was publisher of the "Vermont Almanac." A few years later he opened a private school in Woodstock, Vermont, which he conducted five years, during which he pursued his studies and reached the point where he decided to move to Boston, to have an opportunity to secure the advantages of access to the noted libraries there. He enjoyed the sympathetic companionship of many noted educators, more especially Hon. Horace Mann.
Marshall Conant was principal of the normal school seven years, his resignation, at the end of that useful period, as had been the case with Mr. Tillinghast, being occasioned by illness. After resting for a time, Mr. Conant spent ten years in Washington, District of Columbia, or- ganizing and carrying on the Department of Internal Revenue.
For six and one-half years, Mr. Conant had as assistant in the normal school, Albert G. Boyden, who had taught nearly every branch in the course of studies, and had been a pupil at the school, under the first principal. He had a broad knowledge of the school, and had even served as its janitor during a part of his student course, to help pay his way. He was considered eminently qualified for the position of third principal
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and his service in that capacity amply justified the opinions of those who placed him in that position. He served as principal from 1860 to 1906, forty-six useful years. He had previously, following his gradua- tion from the same school, taught in Hingham, served as an assistant to Nicholas Tillinghast, served as principal of the Classical and English High School at Salem, sub-master in the Chapman School in Boston, re-called to the Bridgewater Normal School as assistant to Mr. Conant.
The progress of the normal school from an attendance of sixty-seven students the first fall term after Mr. Boyden was appointed principal, with the addition of buildings, equipment and everything which marked progress in education, reflected great credit upon this leader in educa- tional thought for half a century in Massachusetts. New courses were introduced, a story was added to the old wooden building in 1871, the first chemical laboratory was equipped for individual work in 1874. The boarding hall was built in 1869 and enlarged in 1873 to accommodate one hundred and forty students. The school building was again en- larged in 1881. In 1882, George H. Martin, for eighteen years an as- sistant teacher, was appointed agent of the Board of Education.
In 1881, Mr. Boyden purchased six acres of land on the opposite side of Plymouth Street from the school-buildings and laid it out for a campus for the school, at his own expense. This was taken over by the State in 1886 and is known as "Boyden Park."
A separate laboratory building was erected in 1881. It was a hand- some structure, two stories in height. In 1883 sewage disposal beds were provided, utilizing the sewage for the irrigation of growing crops and grass land.
The semi-centennial of the normal school was celebrated August 28, 1890. At that time the institution had seven laboratories, "well sup- plied with typical, working and classified collections," to quote the words of Mr. Boyden in his historical address. "The grounds of the school had increased from one and one-fourth acres to fourteen acres, and include the school lot of three acres; Boyden Park containing six acres, Normal Grove, a half-acre of fine chestnut growth adjoining the park; the gift of Messrs. Lewis G. Love and Samuel P. Gates, of Bridge- water, alumni of the school; and a sewage farm of four and one-half acres."
A gymnasium for systematic, physical training was added in 1894. That same year admission to the normal school was confined to gradu- ates of high schools of a standard satisfactory to the Board of Educa- tion, or to those who had an equivalent education. The Model School, a training school, was established in 1891. A kindergarten was estab- lished in 1893. In 1894, the Legislature appropriated $75,000 for the enlargement of the school-building by the addition of a third section, mainly for the use of the Model School. In 1895 an appropriation of
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$59,000 was expended for the erection of a dormitory and a laundry and an athletic field on Grove Street. The new dormitory was named "Tillinghast Hall," in honor of the first principal.
For thirty-five years, the normal school had been under the united guidance of Mr. and Mrs. Boyden, when, October 1, 1895, Mrs. Boyden passed on, aged seventy years. She had begun work at the normal school at the age of twenty-three as a student and classmate of Mr. Boyden. After her graduation she, like him, taught in Hingham, Massa- chusetts. She also taught in Westerly, Rhode Island, and the Wheaton Female Seminary at Norton, Massachusetts, now Wheaton College. When Mr. Boyden was assistant teacher in the normal school, in 1851, their marriage took place.
In 1906, when the normal school was sixty years old, there had been enrolled from Massachusetts, 4,107 students; from twenty-three other States, 606; and from eleven foreign countries, forty-five. The first group of foreign students entered in 1885, under official arrange- ment with the government at Chile. There had been individual students from other countries graduate previously. Mr. Alvarado, one of the students from Chile, was elected by his government as a professor in the College of Santiago. Mr. Lopez, another from Chile, was appointed superintendent of schools for the northern provinces of Chile, after both had graduated from the Bridgewater Normal School. In 1896, five young men came from the State of Coahuila, Mexico, with Professor Andrés Osuna, one of the instructors in the normal school in Coahuila, and all six took the two years' course.
The Albert Gardner Boyden Memorial Gymnasium, as it was offici- ally named by the Board of Education, was the last building erected under Mr. Boyden's direction. He resigned as principal August 1, 1906, and at the same time was appointed principal emeritus. He was succeeded by his son, Arthur Clarke Boyden, who had been vice- principal of the school for a number of years.
On the occasion of Mr. Boyden's eightieth birthday, a dinner was given in his honor at the Walpole Town Hall, Mr. Boyden having been born in that town and retaining throughout his fourscore years many friendships. Masters or sub-masters in the Boston schools, who had been pupils of Mr. Boyden, numbered sixty and were well represented. Congratulatory letters were received from President Theodore Roose- velt of the United States, Governor Curtis Guild of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University, and many others.
In 1907 Principal-emeritus Boyden presented to the normal school nearly two acres of land adjoining the campus for a natural science garden. In September, 1906, a new department of biology and school gardening was established. In 1910 an eighty-four foot greenhouse was
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erected in connection with the natural science garden, a gift of Mrs. Elizabeth R. Stevens of Swansea, who graduated from the school in 1872. In 1911 "Woodward Hall," a dormitory adjoining South Field, erected at a cost of $175,000, was ready and immediately the accommo- dations for one hundred and sixty-eight students were taken. In 1916 old Normal Hall, erected in 1869, was torn down and a modern brick building erected in its place, at a cost of $237,000. The new building furnished the best modern facilities for a refectory with administration offices and reference library on the first floor and a large dining hall, service rooms and a dormitory.
The seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the normal school was observed June 19, 1915, with a pageant depicting the history of the school. Mr. Boyden had taken much interest in the preparations but he did not live to witness their culmination. He passed away May 30, 1915, but had been privileged to continue his teaching until very near the end.
When the Bridgewater Normal School was started there were only fourteen high schools in the State. The number nearly reached two hundred and fifty before Mr. Boyden's resignation as principal after forty-six years' service. Three hundred schools were in one year broken up by the insubordination of pupils, in those early years of education in Massachusetts, and enemies of the public school system continued their attacks until the Civil War. In 1860 there was a petition to the Legislature to abolish the school fund, the normal and high schools and the town system, but these petitioners were given leave to withdraw and this was the last serious attack of enemies of education in the Commonwealth which gave it birth in America.
At the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bridgewater Normal School in 1916 there were among its graduates, thirty-five normal and training school principals, one hundred and fifty normal school teachers, one hundred and twenty-five superintendents and supervisors, one hundred and fifty-five high school teachers, fifty-eight masters of Boston gram- mar schools, two hundred masters of other large city grammar schools, twenty-eight teachers in colleges, two State superintendents, six agents of the State Board of Education, nine hundred and fifty-one men gradu- ates with an average of thirteen years of teaching to their credit, 3,635 women graduates with an average teaching service of eight and six- tenths years, the whole number of years of teaching reaching the ag- gregate of 43,616 years. These facts are taken from a memorial volume concerning "Albert Gardner Boyden and the Bridgewater State Normal School," by Arthur Clarke Boyden, A. M., the present principal.
Many other facts mentioned in this story of the school are also taken from that work "done in loving memory of an honored father," by a worthy successor, of whom the late principal-emeritus wrote at the
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time of his resigning the principalship : "I am greatly pleased that my son is to be my successor in the principalship, which gives the assurance that the school will move in the same spirit that has dominated it from the beginning, and with equally high ideals." This prediction has been fulfilled and the present principal, Arthur Clarke Boyden, graduated from the school in 1871, made an instructor in 1879, vice principal in 1898 and principal in 1906, is deserving of the honor of being classed with the three other principals, all four remarkable educators and leaders of men, Nicholas Tillinghast, Marshall Conant and Albert Gard- ner Boyden.
Principal Arthur C. Boyden, "Mr. Arthur" as he was affectionately called in his years as instructor, arranged for the World's Fair at St. Louis, an exhibit of the work done in the Model School in nature study. He had been an enthusiast on nature-work for twenty-five years and was the leading exponent of the subject in Massachusetts. The nature study movement was then at its height and the Bridgewater Normal School was taking a leading position in its development. Mr. Boyden was then an instructor. The exhibit received the grand prize at the St. Louis exposition and concerning it one of the educational papers said: "While it is true that the West is more strongly repre- sented than the East, the exhibit from the State Normal School at Bridgewater is preeminently the fullest and richest and the most care- fully prepared nature-work in the whole educational exhibit."
In the years of the Civil War, between 1861 and 1864, thirty-two per cent of the whole number of young men enrolled as students in the normal school entered the army. There were one hundred and fifteen names on the honor roll of the school, sixty-nine officers and forty-six privates. Of this number twelve gave their lives. James Henry Schneider, first assistant to the principal, was one of those who enlisted, was made chaplain of his regiment and died of yellow fever in Florida in 1864.
In the World War there were fifty-seven stars on the school service flag. Four gave their lives: Robert E. Pellissier, a sergeant, killed in action at the Somme, August 9, 1916; Jesse S. P. Matossian and Armenag Chamichian, victims of the Turkish atrocities on the Armeni- ans; and Harold R. Blake, who died of spinal meningitis in France. An ambulance was contributed in memory of Sergeant Pellissier. It reached the front in September, 1917, on its errand of mercy. Those who remained in the school engaged in all the activities of those days and over $1,900 was contributed for relief funds.
A few years ago a disastrous fire wiped out some of the buildings and there was talk of moving the normal school to some other town in the State, on the claim that the water supply did not afford adequate protection against a repetition of such a loss. Arrangements were made
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to provide against insufficient water service in the future and the new buildings furnish ideal and safe accommodations for the commendable purposes of the institution.
The Bridgewater State Normal School was one of the three public normal schools which were created by the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1838. The first was opened at Lexington, July 3, 1839, in the building which was erected for the Lexington Academy, over- looking Lexington Common, the battleground of the Lexington minute- men in the American Revolution. The building is still standing, although it has been considerably changed by remodelling. The second normal school was opened at Barre, September 4, 1839; and the third was the Bridgewater Normal School which was opened September 9, 1840. This group of three were the forerunners of one hundred and twenty- seven State normal schools and State teachers' colleges which are now established in the United States. The school first opened at Lexington is now located at Framingham.
It is stated in "The First State Normal School in America," made up somewhat from the journals of Cyrus Pierce and Mary Swift, with an introduction by Arthur O. Norton, that "a bitter controversy raged about these institutions during their early years, and especially during the years 1839-1842. They had been established after a fourteen-year campaign by the friends of public education, to meet the desperate need of competent teachers for the district schools of the State. Similar institutions had long been successful in Prussia, and they had been established recently in France. Their success in Massachusetts was uncertain; hence they were set up at first merely as a three-year ex- periment. A powerful group of enemies in the State and in the Legis- lature were determined to abolish these schools without delay, and lost no time in moving to the attack. Misrepresentation and abusive attacks in the newspapers, and propaganda in the Legislature, were employed against the normal schools. In Horace Mann's phrase 'Ignorance, bigotry and economy were arrayed against them.'"
When the normal school was opened in Bridgewater there were less than twenty high schools established in the State. The ungraded district schools were, with few exceptions, the only public schools there were. A few communities had schools graded as primary, grammar and high schools but these were rare exceptions. Railroads in the State were very few. Most travel was by stagecoach, horseback or by chaise or other form of vehicle. The State had been largely devoted to agri- culture, with sea-faring in the counties from Cape Ann to Buzzards Bay. It was rapidly changing to a manufacturing State but the time had not arrived for large centres of population demanding graded schools sufficiently to have the general public think much about them.
Among those interested in the establishment of normal schools, that
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instruction of the young might be carried on much better, were members of that distinguished group of thinkers at Concord, known as the Transcendentalists, such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and A. Bronson Alcott. The latter was one of the most progressive teachers of his time. He conducted a private school in Boston from 1834 to 1839 which was many years ahead of the times.
It may be necessary to remind some of the people of the present generation that he was the father of the four "Little Women" mentioned in the book of that title written by his daughter, Louisa Alcott, and which was considered a part of the education of every girl fifty years ago to be familiar with. She also wrote "Little Men," the scene of which was a school for boys located in Plymouth. It is one of the interesting reminiscences of the early normal scools how A. Bronson Alcott lectured on "Transcendentalism" before the pupils and how few, even after his patient instruction, knew what it was all about.
Rev. Cyrus Pierce, the first principal of the normal school at Lex- ington, was, at the time of his selection for the position, teaching school at Nantucket.
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CHAPTER XXIX SUBURBAN LIFE AT ITS BEST.
One City and Twenty-six Towns Enjoy the Best in American Institu- tions, Industries and Achievements-The Doorway of Freedom Swings Open to Unusual Prosperity and Happiness-Shoemaking an Important Industry from Earliest Times-Raising of Poultry an Ever-increasing Major Vocation-Pen Pictures of the Towns and Mention of Their Important Distinctions.
Many histories have been written of the various towns, giving in detail the struggles of the early churches, industries, organization and growth of the societies of all kinds, leading up to a virtual directory of all of these things, lists of officers, past officers, property, activities and plans for the future. Many of these histories were written in the days when directories were seldom if ever published of their respective localities. and such information, although a short time caused it to be obsolete, was more legitimate than now. No attempt will be made in the refer- ences to the towns to go into details concerning these personnels and annals. Rather facts will be printed of the latest information available to give means of comparisons, to show the relative importance of the different towns in the make-up of the county.
The writer does not consider it his assignment to write a Doomsday book, like a diary of events in Southeastern Massachusetts from the birth of Snorri to the bedtime story of last night. Neither is it his con- viction that a history of three counties should be too much given to small town gossip of no interest outside the confines of the respective small towns. The beginnings of the various towns were much alike- gathering iron ore, providing for the herring fisheries, building meeting- houses, paying bounties for killing crows and blackbirds, shooting In- dians and keeping out of the stocks or pillory, if one could possibly do so.
Later, when the country became governed by lawyers instead of ministers, wars came and the citizenry responded patriotically, every town nobly bore its brunt of the hardships of service. Rapid transit and new means for transportation were demanded and farmers left their ploughs to become manufacturers as well as to go to war. Whatever new conditions required, all the towns arose to the emergency and fitted into the new scheme of life. Consequently this volume departs somewhat from the old classics, generalizes in places where some others have itemized, and fails to plead guilty of being either an echo or a directory.
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Before proceeding to take up each town in the county and present the local history which makes that town an important and interesting mem- ber of the group which makes up the county, it may be understood that the history is written in reverse order to the usual procedure. In nearly all histories, it has been the rule to begin at the beginning, telling when the town was incorporated and leading the reader through all its vicis- situdes until the reader finds himself once more set down in the twen- tieth century where he was when he started. Perhaps that is the bet- ter way. At least it has the merit of convention and long-continuance and, naturally, satisfies the person who argues that the egg was before the hen, therefore the first inspection is due the shell and contents and one should perforce be compelled to grow up with the country.
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