USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 23
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The pastors of the church since Mr. Smith have been Rev. Jacob Russell who, like Deacon Barksdale, was formerly connected with the White Oak Church in Virginia, Rev. Thomas Bruce (1897-1902), Rev. Charles H. Johnson (1903-1908) and Rev. William H. Smith, who is still the pastor. The church received the name New Hope Baptist Church in 1908.
Any account of the religious life of Winchester should include
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mention of the Young Men's Christian Association, organized here in May 1890. Mr. Robert M. Armstrong, who was the general superintendent of the Young Men's Christian Association for Massachusetts, was instrumental in establishing an association in his own home town, and he was successful in arousing a real interest in the undertaking. Several citizens gave liberally, and the asso- ciation, after a modest preliminary existence in rooms in White's Block, took larger quarters at 9 Pleasant (now Mt. Vernon) Street, where it had a game room, a reading room and a well-equipped gymnasium. It acquired a highly capable and likeable general sec- retary in Mr. Ernest S. Gay, and attracted more than a hundred boys and young men to its membership. A useful feature of its activities was the programme of talks, by men who had something valuable to say to young men, which Mr. Gay arranged every winter during his stay in Winchester. The ministers and churches of the town lent their hearty cooperation, and an auxiliary organi- zation of ladies was active in its support. For fifteen years the Young Men's Christian Association was one of the institutions of the town. Mr. F. V. Wooster was its first president and he was succeeded in 1894 by Mr. Arthur W. Hale.
But Winchester is not an ideal location for such an association. It is a town of homes where few young people stand in need of organized means of recreation or are without the proper home influ- ences. It proved unable to support permanently the Young Men's Christian Association. Mr. Gay was called to a larger opportunity at Lawrence and his departure snapped the mainspring of the Winchester "Y."
CHAPTER XVII
THE SCHOOLS OF WINCHESTER
WHEN the town of Winchester was incorporated, it inherited from Woburn two schoolhouses and from Medford one. Two of these, the house at Symmes Corner and the West Side School on Cambridge Street near Pond Street, were very small, and the West Side School was dilapidated into the bargain. The third was the school at the center which occupied a house of two stories at the corner of Church and Dix streets. Woburn at this time had the district system of school organization. This South Woburn School was not the property of the town but of "District No. 5." It had been built in 1843 by the citizens of the district, which comprised the greater part of what became the town of Winchester, and the cost of maintenance and instruction was paid by them.
After the incorporation of the town this schoolhouse was made over to the town by the voters of the district who owned it, for it was no part of the plans of the new town government to preserve the antiquated and slip-shod district system. At the very first town meeting the voters chose a strong School Committee, Rev. Mr. Steele, pastor of the Congregational church, Frederick O. Prince and Charles Goddard, and appointed a committee to report on the best location for the new school buildings which by general agree- ment were necessary. The committee consisted of Oliver R. Clark, Joseph Stone, John H. Bacon, Charles Kimball and W. A. Dodge.1
One of the causes for dissatisfaction with the old connection with Woburn had been that the arrangements for schooling were inadequate and the number of schoolhouses insufficient. The com- mittee just named reported to a town meeting on August 19 that four new schoolhouses ought at once to be built. The house at the center and the Mystic School at Symmes Corner could be used, but the West Side School was badly located, almost on the town line, and it was not in proper condition to move. A new building
1 Town Records, Vol. I, page 32.
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to take its place, farther south on Cambridge Street, was required; of the other three new houses, one was recommended on High Street in the Andrews Hill district, another on Main Street beyond Cutter Village and a third on Washington Street "near Calvin Richard- son's."
The town promptly voted to build all the houses recommended, appropriated $4,000 to construct them, and to have a high school as well, and to fit up a room in the Center Schoolhouse for that purpose.1 It had already voted to raise $1,500 for the use of the schools during the first year of the town's existence.
Small as these sums seem today, they were generous for the time. In the first place, no town of less than four thousand popula- tion was obliged by law to keep a high school, but Winchester, with hardly more than a third of that population, was determined to have one. Four thousand dol- lars for new schools was a lot of money for a town with no money in its pocket, and a tax list of less than $3,000 for all purposes. Fifteen hundred dollars was twice as much as Woburn had ever spent on the education of the school children in the south- ern end of the town. The THE OLD WYMAN SCHOOL enterprise and liberality of Winchester in these early years is recorded in the tables prepared by the State Superintendent of Education. One of these tables ranked the towns of the state according to the amount of school appropriation in relation to the number of pupils in the schools; the other rated the towns with respect to the proportion of their taxable property spent on schools. In 1852 Winchester stood second among the three hundred and thirty-three towns in the first table, surpassed only by Brookline. In the second table it stood ninth.2
The four new schoolhouses were as like as peas in a pod, square solid little buildings with cupolas projecting from their roofs. One,
1 Town Records, Vol. I, page 49.
2 Report of School Committee for 1860, page 8.
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named the Washington School, was on Cross Street a little way from Washington Street; another, called the Rumford,1 stood just off Main Street on Salem Street; a third, the Hill School, was set up on High Street near its junction with Ridge Street; the fourth was on Cambridge Street near Deacon Marshall Wyman's and it was accordingly named the Wyman School. The town found it impossible to buy land for the Wyman School at what it thought a fair price, and for fifteen years the schoolhouse stood on land rented from the Reed family for some ten dollars a year. These were all primary schools; children old enough to attend the gram- mar school came down to the large center school on Church Street opposite the Common on which the name of Gifford School had been conferred.2 The high school was kept in the upper rooms of this building.
Hardly had the first four new schoolhouses been completed, when it was found necessary to build two more, one for the primary pupils in the center of the village, and one to replace the old Mystic School at Symmes Corner, which was found small and inconvenient. The first named was placed on the lot at Washington and Myrtle streets, the other was built on Bacon Street a little way below Symmes Corner, where it or its successor was a familiar object for seventy years.
Each school - even the high school - had a single teacher. The high school, and usually the Gifford School, had men as mas- ters; the primary schools were taught by women. The men were paid $600 and later $700 a year; the primary school-teachers received $400.
The School Committee commanded from the first the services of some of the foremost men of the town. Dr. Chapin was a mem- ber for more than twelve years, and Edwin A. Wadleigh for many terms. Frederick O. Prince, Charles P. Curtis, Jr., Rev. Reuben T. Robinson, Rev. N. A. Reed, Oliver R. Clark, A. K. P. Joy, Dr. Winsor, Stephen A. Holt, Rev. Henry Hinckley, Rev. George Cooke, Joseph H. Tyler, Alfred S. Hall and others equally devoted gave valuable service to the town on this committee. In 1874 women were first chosen to membership; Mrs. Dr. Winsor, Mrs.
1 In honor of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, Woburn's most famous native son.
2 In honor of Hon. S. M. Gifford. See page 166.
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Charles Pressey and Mrs. Edwin Lamson were elected in that year, the committee having been enlarged to six. After some years the practice of electing women as committeemen was discontinued and the committee reduced to three; but in 1922 it was resumed, and ever since the ladies have had their fair share in the conduct of Winchester's school system.
The early reports of the School Committee are interesting read- ing. Often very voluminous, they discuss at length and generally with great good sense the problems and the theories of education as it was then understood. They also go into much detail about the conduct of the several Winchester schools. There was no paid superintendent in those days; the committeemen divided the super- vision of the different schools between them, visited them inde- fatigably, and held themselves personally responsible for the selec- tion of teachers and the lines of teaching they offered. The reports are full of a frank personal criticism that must have been embar- rassing. "Mr. - as a disciplinarian was signally deficient. He was wanting in energy, in uniformity and system." "Miss - was retained in the hope that with experience she would improve and become a successful teacher; this expectation has not been fully realized." "Miss - has failed to secure the affection of her pupils and the good-will of the parents." In justice it should be added that commendation of satisfactory teachers was equally specific and far more frequent.
Discipline was a problem of the first order, particularly in the Gifford School at the center. This school had a tradition none too good, inherited from the old district school which it succeeded. "Number Five" had been a troublesome school when it was still a part of the Woburn system. As in many a rural New England school of the time, there was a continual feud between the teacher and the larger boys, hobbledehoys who had to be subdued by the strong hand of a master, else they were likely to toss him out of his own schoolhouse. The Woburn committee, in the years before the incorporation of Winchester, were constantly reporting the failure of teachers, especially the women teachers, to maintain order, and in 1850 it called the school "backward and unsatisfac- tory," and added that there had been so much disorder that many children had been removed from school by their parents.
THE HIGH SCHOOL
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Things were never so bad as that after the Winchester School Committee took charge of it, but for a number of years the diffi- culty of getting a teacher who could control the school was the burden of the committee's song. "This school," one report says plaintively, "has a bad reputation for insubordination, and bids fair to maintain it."1 Yet some teachers were found who could keep order as well as convey instruction; the tone of the school improved year by year; after the middle sixties we look in vain in the committee reports for the familiar lamentations over the Gif- ford School.
Another object of solicitude to the committee was the high school. There was a party in the town that held such a school was unnecessary in a place of the size of Winchester, and that its main- tenance was a piece of costly ostentation. The committee had con- tinually to do battle for its high school. Those early reports were loud in defending the high school as the crown of Winchester's educational system, and a proper object of pride to the citizenry. They were eloquent on the advantages of Greek and Latin studies, and the necessity of maintaining a classical department in the school, in order that Winchester youth might receive a preparation for college without leaving the town. This was the point where the battle raged hardest, for though the critics of the high school were never able to persuade the town to give it up, they did in 1862 carry in town meeting a resolve that "the classical department be abolished, and that it be conducted as an English High School."2
The committee yielded reluctantly, and for several years, Greek was omitted and Latin preserved only as an elective for a single year. But the weight of public opinion soon swung in the other direction, and by 1870 the classical studies were back in the curriculum.
The growth of the town had begun to make the first school accommodations inadequate before Winchester was ten years old. In 1857 the town built a two-story schoolhouse on Swanton Street near the corner of Washington and named it the Adams School, in honor, we are told, of John Quincy Adams. This school afforded room for the children of a rapidly growing part of the town - the
1 School Committee report for 1859, page 15.
2 Town Records, Vol. I, page 375.
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Plains so-called; it contained both a primary and a grammar department.
In 1864 the Wyman Schoolhouse, which had long stood on rented ground, was moved to a lot bought by the town of Miss Patience Gardner, near the corner of Church and Cambridge streets on the southerly side of the former street.
By 1865 it was necessary to do something to give better accom- modations to the high and grammar schools. The old schoolhouse on Church Street had become crowded; it was never well placed, for the lot was so small and so contracted by the rising ground behind it that there was nowhere for the children to go at recess time but into the street. The Gifford Grammar School had long since removed to the primary school building at Washington and Myrtle streets, but there was not enough room there for the increas- ing number of scholars in the two schools. The town therefore voted to build new houses for the two upper schools. For the high school it bought a lot on Church Street running through to Dix Street. This lot, which was adjacent to the site of Lieutenant James Converse's old house, built soon after 1650, stood well above the street. The building erected there served as a high school for nearly forty years; after that, its name changed to the Prince School, it was a West side grammar school for twenty years more. It was abandoned and pulled down when the school building pro- gramme of 1922-1924 was carried out.
The grammar school was housed in a new house built on the lot occupied by the Gifford School at Washington and Myrtle streets. The old building was moved to a site on Main Street next to that where the Unitarian church was to rise two or three years later. It took the name of Gifford School with it and became the primary school for the children of the center and much of the east side of the town. The new grammar school had no other name until after the death of Mr. Edwin A. Wadleigh in 1886, when his name was bestowed on it in recognition of his years of interest in and service to the schools of Winchester. The grammar school building cost the town $15,000; the high school house was a little more expensive; it cost $18,000. The old high school house was sold and removed to Vine Street. It has survived numerous alterations and improvements, and is today the funeral home of Kelley and
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SCHOOLS IN WINCHESTER
Hawes. On the lot where it stood there was built a house familiar to Winchester people for many years as a physician's residence. Dr. Daniel March, Jr. was the first to live there; for a long genera- tion it has been the home of Dr. George N. P. Mead.
It may be added here that by 1876 the rapid increase in the number of children in the Adams School district required more school accommodation there. The old schoolhouse was abandoned, and a much larger one built farther west on Swanton Street. It was named the Chapin School for Dr. Alonzo Chapin who well deserved the honor for his years of devoted service to the Winches- ter schools. In 1879 another new school was built on Highland Avenue at Eaton Street, the small two-room house that still stands there. It was intended for the smaller primary scholars in that part of the town; a cozy, "homey" sort of school like the older Mystic. It has so won its way into the affections of the neighbor- hood that the parents would not listen to its discontinuance when that was proposed in 1923 in connection with the school-building programme of that year. It still remains, an "old-fashioned" but much beloved unit in the town's educational system.
It would be tiresome to readers not deeply interested in educa- tional technique to describe the steps in the steady widening of the range and scope of the courses given in the Winchester schools during the last eighty years. But mention ought to be made of the advance made in 1871, when the committee drew up a wholly new curriculum for the schools into which many distinctly modern features were introduced. The "reform," if such it can be called, had its origin in a petition addressed to the School Committee by such leading townsmen as Dr. F. Winsor, Oliver R. Clark, A. K. P. Joy, Thomas P. Ayer, E. A. Brackett, S. H. Folsom, E. A. Wad- leigh, Charles Pressey, H. B. Metcalf and many more. It read:
"The undersigned ... respectfully petition for such a change in the course of study in the Public Schools as shall call for less time to be spent on arithmetic, descriptive geography, and abstract grammar, while more shall be devoted to the study and practice of the English language and to exercises adapted to train the per- ceptive and descriptive powers." The committee - Dr. Chapin, Rev. George Cooke and Mr. J. C. Johnson then comprised it - proved hospitable to the suggestion. The members went into con-
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sultation with some of the petitioners, and with Mr. Patten, the high school principal, Mr. Sanborn of the grammar school, and Miss Senter and Miss Wadleigh of the lower grades, and emerged from these conferences with a plan of studies founded, it appears, on a recently adopted graded course of studies for the New Bed- ford schools, and full of what were then striking innovations in the way of broadening the base of instruction which had for so many years rested on little beyond the "three Rs." "The leading principles," said the committee, "are such as are fundamental to the preëminent success of the German schools, and are so obviously essential to successful school-work anywhere, that it is strange they have had such tardy recognition in New England. ... It is begin- ning to be comprehended that our [New England] methods are not absolutely the best in the world!"] This year then may. be taken as the dividing line between the old and the new in Win- chester school methods; there are few systems in. Massachusetts which were beforehand with our town in taking this important step in advance.
The School Committee of 1877 had one very curious matter to handle, some account of which may interest and perhaps amuse my readers. The principal of the grammar school at this time was a young man named J. Frank Baxter, an excellent teacher from all accounts, but a firm believer in spiritualism. It was his habit to devote many of his evenings to delivering addresses on spiritualism in Boston or the surrounding towns, and to conducting seances - for he fancied himself the possessor of mediumistic powers. To this the School Committee objected on the ground that he so far exhausted his energies by the practice as to interfere with his work as a teacher. They insisted he must give up his lectures and seances in term-time and Mr. Baxter agreed to do so. During the summer vacation, however, he was extremely active at Onset Bay, Lake Pleasant and elsewhere, in the activities forbidden during the school year.
Now there was living in the college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts, an eccentric negro who called himself Abe Bunter, and who had won a certain celebrity in that region by his ability to run head-on into a tough plank of wood set up on end, and to 1 School Committee Report for 1872, pages 16, 17.
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crack it with his skull. Abe was a well-known character about the streets of Williamstown and the college campus, and his name was not unfamiliar to people all over the state. One day in 1875 the newspaper carried the news of Abe Bunter's death; as in the case of Mark Twain, however, the report was "much exaggerated." The man had not died after all but the contradiction of the report had no such publicity as the report itself.
Mr. Baxter saw the piece about Abe's death; he missed the contradiction; and at one of his seances at Lake Pleasant, in August 1877, he received a long communication which purported to be from Bunter in the spirit world. One of his audience was so unkind as to rise in his place and declare in firm tones that Abe Bunter had not died as reported, and was very much alive at that moment. The episode got into the newspapers and the School Committee, thinking that matters had gone a little too far, dis- missed Mr. Baxter from his school. He tried to spread the report that he owed the loss of his position to religious prejudice, and the committee, in defence of its action, gave up no small part of its annual report to an account of the case and the assertion that Mr. Baxter had been discharged not as a spiritualist, but as a person convicted of open fraud.1 Mr. Charles E. Swett succeeded Mr. Baxter; an excellent teacher, whose services the town lost too early, since he accepted a position as purchasing agent for the Congre- gational church offices in Boston, though he remained until his death in 1925 a resident of Winchester.
By 1880, thirty years after its inauguration, the Winchester school system was firmly established and well conducted, according to the standards of the time. The teaching staff numbered nine- teen, including two assistants at the high school and three at the grammar school; there were three teachers at the Chapin and two each at the Gifford and the Rumford. The school budget amounted to $13,000. The high school was making steady progress, the old prejudice against it having disappeared, and under the conduct of Lewis Parkhurst, a young Dartmouth graduate who became its principal in 1886, it became one of the best schools in the state. After five years' service Mr. Parkhurst resigned to become con- nected with the publishing house of Ginn and Company, in which
1 School Committee's Report for 1878.
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he eventually became a principal partner. He continued to live in Winchester, however, and for half a century he has been a lead- ing citizen of the town, distinguished by his generosity and public spirit. Under his successor, Edwin N. Lovering, who was head- master for more than thirty years, the school continued to improve and expand, and to sustain its reputation among the high schools of the state. Subsequent headmasters - Charles L. Curtis, Edward E. Thompson, Clinton L. Farnham and Wade L. Grindle-have maintained the standards long ago established.
In 1882 the schools were at last placed under the executive direction of a superintendent; the details of management had got beyond the powers of the School Committee, busy people whose time was occupied with many other duties. Mr. B. F. Tweed, a former superintendent of schools in Charlestown, was the first to fill the office. He was followed by Dr. Ephraim Hunt (1888), who divided his time as superintendent between Winchester and Med- ford, and he in turn by Henry M. Wallradt, who also gave only a part of his time to the superintendency.
The first full-time occupant of the office was Robert C. Met- calf, already a resident of the town, who undertook the duties in 1902 after a lifetime of experience in school supervision, most of it spent in Boston. The school system felt the effects of his knowl- edge and ability at once, and though he was an elderly man when he assumed his duties, he gave the town seven years of invaluable service. His successors, all capable administrators and educational experts, have been Schuyler F. Herron (1909-1918), John F Fausey (1918-1923) and James J. Quinn (1923-
To describe with any attempt at fullness the broadening, enrichment and progressive improvement of the school curriculum during all these years would be to usurp a great amount of space with matter which could interest only the occasional reader. It is well to mention certain important advances in our educational system, however. Such were the appointment of a supervisor of music, Mr. J. C. Johnson, in 1872, the introduction of foreign lan- guages (beginning with French) into the course of studies in the high school about the same time, the establishment of the first kindergarten in 1893, the addition of a department of commercial studies into the high school in 1903; the introduction of sloyd,
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