USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 13
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The school committee in 1880 began to urge the dedication of the present Common to school purposes, and this project was recommended also to the town by a special committee appointed in 1881 to consider the matter of sites; but the measure was not approved, although the voters were now appreciative of the ne- cessity. The school population was increasing at a rate which would fill three or four additional rooms a year, and singular ex- pedients were employed, as when the congestion in the Silver Lake school was relieved by removing a number of its pupils to a room in a block on Fenn Street, under the same roof with such academic inspirations as a billiard saloon and a roller skating rink.
The town was no longer disposed to view the situation with complacency. In 1883, a new schoolhouse was authorized at Pontoosuc and another at the corner of Fenn and Second Streets. The former was ready for occupancy in 1884, and the latter in 1885. New schoolhouses at the Junction and on Linden Street
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were built in 1888 and 1889, and one on Winter Street at Morn- ingside in 1890. These buildings were adequate and creditable; and while it cannot be said that, at the time when the town in 1891 became a city, the equipment of schoolhouses was what the public deserved to have, it is true that the voters at town meetings after 1880 had displayed a spirit distinctly more earnest than that of their predecessors in supporting public edu- cation. The town's last annual appropriation for the mainte- nance of schools was $48,000.
Upon Mr. Hull's retirement from the office of chairman of the town's school committee in 1882, he was succeeded by Dr. Abner M. Smith, who served until 1885. Dr. Smith was follow- ed, for a period of three years, by Dr. William M. Mercer. In 1888, Col. Walter Cutting was chairman, and, in 1889, Harlan H. Ballard, who served until the expiration of the town government. Thomas H. Day was superintendent of schools, following Mr. Rice, from 1886 to 1891. The importance to the town of the duties undertaken by these men and their associates on the school committees is indicated by the facts that, between 1882 and 1891, the school enrolment increased from 2,783 to 3,422, the number of schools from forty-three to sixty-three, and the num- ber of teachers from sixty-two to eighty-six. They instituted a training school for teachers, revived evening schools, which had been abandoned in 1876, and broadened the field of usefulness of the common schools by encouraging instruction in mechanical and free-hand drawing, vocal music, and natural science. Nor should it be forgotten, in recording their efforts to establish a right and liberal policy, that Pittsfield's latterly overgrown and overhurried town meetings did not always allow a forum adapted to the discussion of educational theory and practice. Neverthe- less, on penalty of decreased appropriations, it was necessary for the school committeemen and their allies, in open meeting, to defend progressive methods of instruction and school organiza- tion against all comers, to satisfy the scruples of honest voters whose ideas of the scope of public education had been formed in the rural district schools of their boyhood, and even sometimes to placate then and there an oratorical father whose children had a grievance against a teacher or a textbook.
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The city's first school committce, in 1891, had for its chair- man Joscph Tucker, who held the office until 1896. William B. Rice was the chairman in 1896, 1897 and 1898. In 1899, Judge Tucker resumed the chairmanship of the committee, and therein served continuously for six years. He was succeeded in 1905 by William L. Adam, who was chairman until 1914. In 1914 and 1915, Joseph E. Peirson was the official head of the school committee, which, under the municipal charter, consisted of fourteen members, two being elected by each ward of the city. Beginning in 1891 and continuing through 1915, William Nugent was a member of the committee, and its secretary.
The committee of 1891 soon lost by resignation the services as superintendent of Mr. Day, and A. M. Edwards was engaged to replace him. Among the salaried superintendents of Pittsfield schools, Mr. Edwards was the first who brought to the office any previous technical training in his professional duties, and who had not been a member of the committee which employed him. He served for three years. In 1894, Dr. Eugene Bouton accepted the position and held it until 1905, when he was succeeded by Charles A. Byram. Mr. Byram's tenure of the office ceased in 1909; Clarence J. Russell performed the duties of "acting super- intendent" from September 1909, to June 1910; and upon the latter date Clair G. Persons, who still holds the position, became superintendent.
Many new features characterized the progress of the public schools of Massachusetts after 1890. Some of them were the enrichment of courses of study without loss of thoroughness, a greater respect for the pupil's individuality, an extraordinary de- velopment of the high school system, an increased demand for trained skill and earnestness in supervision and in teachers of all grades, and a remarkable advance in schoolhouse construction, sanitation, and equipment. Along these lines, the schools of Pittsfield moved forward; but, somewhat as the schools of the town had been often handicapped by the indifference of the voters at town meeting, so now the schools of the city were to be burdened by the unavoidable difficulties due to an abnormally rapid gain of population. The number of children of school age was, in 1890, 3,276; in 1915 it was 7,463.
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These difficulties were clearly apprehended by the mayor of 1894, John C. Crosby, whose inaugural address advocated a new high school in a central location and laid emphasis on the general need of new schoolhouses. A new schoolhouse had been occupied at Stearnsville in 1893, but the buildings in the center of the city had become inadequate. In March, 1895, the burning of the high school building on South Street complicated the problem. Judge Crosby, who was mayor again in 1895, again pressed forci- bly the necessity of new schoolhouses; the school committee ap- peared before the city council and explained the physical plight of the schools; and in May money was appropriated for three new buildings, with an aggregate capacity of twenty-two rooms and at an aggregate cost of over $100,000. The emergency, when at last appreciated, was squarely met.
With the erection of these buildings was established in Pitts- field the excellent custom of bestowing upon the more important schoolhouses the names of distinguished citizens. Of the school- houses authorized in 1895, the Solomon L. Russell School was built on Peck's Road, the Charles B. Redfield School on Elizabeth Street, and the George N. Briggs School at the corner of West and John Streets. The Russell School and the Redfield School were opened in the fall of 1896. The Briggs School, owing to vexatious delay in construction, was not ready until a year later.
Having authorized this liberal expenditure, however, the city council of 1895 still faced the imperative need of a new building for the high school, and plans for it were at once initiated on a similar generous scale of appropriation. The original cost to the city of the high school building between Second Street and the Common, opened in the spring of 1898, was $170,000. The cost to the town of its immediate predecessor on South Street had been $16,000 in 1876.
Thus in 1895 the city was compelled to shoulder in one year financial burdens, for educational purposes, of which a large share might have been distributed over several previous years; and the troublesome experience was not repeated, although the necessity for new schoolhouses and for the enlargement of exist- ing buildings soon began again to be pressing. In 1905, a spacious and handsome new building, to be known as the William
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M. Mercer School, was dedicated at the corner of First and Orchard Streets. In 1908, the Henry L. Dawes School on Elm Strect was opencd; and the William R. Plunkett School in 1909 was built at the corner of First and Fenn Streets, of which the cost was $80,000. In 1910, the William Nugent School was opened at the Junction, having been erected to replace there the schoolhouse destroyed by fire in April, 1909. On Onota Street, the William Francis Bartlett School was ready for occupancy in 1912. The Crane School in 1913 was opened at Morningside, on Dartmouth Street; and the Pomeroy School, on West Housa- tonic Street, was completed in 1915.
The Winter Street building, erected in 1890, was by the school committee in 1899 officially named the William B. Rice School; in 1907 the name of the Joseph Tucker School was given to the schoolhouse on Linden Street, of which the capacity had been greatly increased since its construction in 1889; and also in 1907 the building which had been erected in 1885 at Fenn and Second Streets received the title of the Franklin F. Read School.
The town meeting voters in 1876 could not regard the Pitts- field high school with complete friendliness. There the annual cost of instruction alone was then more than $40 for each pupil, and the educational function of the school was not very clearly appreciated. Probably most of those who finished its course did so with the intention of becoming teachers. In 1875, and again in 1878, the small graduating class was composed entirely of girls. A few boys were able there to prepare themselves for col- lege, but the vast majority of Pittsfield's public school pupils never saw, and never purposed to see, the inside of a high school. To many voters this school seemed, therefore, like a useless and expensive superfluity, and, had not its continuance been pre- scribed by statute, a motion to abolish it between 1870 and 1880 must have found support.
In 1880 the regular course was one of four years, and during the school year ending in 1884 the average daily attendance ex- ceeded one hundred for the first time. An increase of attendance after this was constantly maintained. The institution began to be recognized as an essential and important part of the public school system. Gradually the curriculum was made more
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elastic. In 1888, the pupil had a choice of four courses of study. These were a classical course, preparatory for college; a scientific course, differing from the classical mainly in the substitution of the sciences for Greek; an English course, differing from the scientific in allowing the pupil a choice between Latin, French, or German in the first and second years, and in the substitution of English for a foreign language in the third and fourth years; and lastly a business course, designed for those who could not remain in the school to complete one of the four-year courses. The average daily attendance first touched two hundred in 1894.
In the following year, however, the educational and numerical development of the school was rudely checked by the destruction by fire of the South Street building. The disaster was so com- plete that the only salvage of school equipment was a piano, a chair, and a teacher's desk. Under these circumstances, com- mendable energy was displayed by the committee and by the faculty of the school. A floor was hired and furnished in the block, then unfinished, on the west corner of Clapp Avenue and West Street; and there the school resumed its sessions in less than a month after the fire. These makeshift quarters were oc- cupied for two school years, and in the fall of 1897 the larger part of the high school was housed in the building on School Street, thus returning temporarily to its old home after an inter- val of a quarter-century.
During this migratory period, the work of the institution was, of course, conducted with great difficulty. Laboratory instruc- tion was almost impossible. That the school was able to pre- serve a considerable measure of usefulness and a commendable measure of morale is to the credit both of the teachers and the scholars.
Their trials were aggravated by many unforeseen delays in the erection of the new building on Second Street. Retarded by the necessity of righting defective workmanship, the progress of construction was slow, and the building was not available for occupancy until 1898. It was a spacious and conveniently ar- ranged edifice of light brick, trimmed with marble and terra cotta, and in dimensions 135 feet by 137. Its three floors might ac- commodate 600 pupils, with the recitation rooms, laboratories,
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and accessories demanded by modern requirements for high school work. An auditorium on the second floor seated 700 people. The first graduation exercises therein were conducted on June twenty-third, 1898, when forty-four students received diplomas. In previous years, the exercises had been held usually at the Academy of Music.
At first, the new building was able to accommodate schools of a lower grade as well as those of the high school, but so ex- traordinarily rapid was the latter's growth that it soon monopol- ized and overflowed its quarters. In 1899 the enrolment of the high school was 247; in 1909 it was 455; in the fall term of 1911 it was 705. In 1912, the commercial section was transferred to the Read School on Fenn Street. In the winter term of 1914, the enrolment of the high school was 945, its actual membership was 891, its faculty numbered thirty-six, and the relief afforded by utilizing the Read building had, in the words of the principal's report, "ceased to exist". This remarkable expansion of the high school in recent years was accompanied, if not accelerated, by several noteworthy changes of method and organization. The so-called business course was greatly strengthened, depart- mental subdivisions were more effectively arranged, a scheme of semi-annual promotions was introduced, and a rational effort was made to develop that elusive quality known as school spirit in both students and instructors.
In 1876 the principal was Albert Tolman, who was succeeded by Earl G. Baldwin in 1878, by Edward H. Rice in 1881, by John B. Welch in 1887, by Charles A. Byram in 1891, and by William D. Goodwin in 1904. Harry E. Pratt, the present principal, followed Mr. Goodwin in 1911.
Later advances achieved by the city's general system of pub- lic schools were most conspicuous, perhaps, in 1911, a year which marked the introduction of a more flexible gradation and of the physical examination of school children. At the same time, in- struction in the manual arts was somewhat forwarded; but this department of public education was peculiarly discouraged by lack of adequate means and facilities, although a one-year's course of manual training for boys was established in 1909, and for girls a course of domestic science in 1913.
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The work of the evening schools, accentuated in value by the increasing number of foreign-born laborers desirous of learning to read and write English, was continued so successfully that in 1913 the maximum attendance therein was 660.
A training school for teachers, which was initiated apparently in 1880, was in 1905 discontinued. More than one-half of the teaching force of the public schools of Pittsfield had been gradu- ated from it, under the instruction, after 1888, of Miss Arabella Roach, at the Orchard Street building, and it had served well the purpose for which it was intended. The school committee of 1905, however, was of the opinion that the convenient efficiencies of the State Normal Schools made its continuance of questionable value.
With far less unanimity of opinion did committee after com- mittee regard the question of kindergarten instruction. It was seriously suggested first by the committee of 1893; an official ap- propriation was not made until 1902 for a kindergarten; and then the Pittsfield Kindergarten Association, which had main- tained a school at Russell's, turned over to the city its equip- ment. The work of this organization and, indeed, its assump- tion and enlargement by the city are to be ascribed chiefly to the enthusiasm in the cause of public kindergartens of Mrs. William L. Adam, who continued to devote herself to their interests for several years after they had become a part of the municipal system of schools.
The number of teachers which the system employed in 1891, the first year of the city form of government, was eighty-six. In 1915 the number of teachers was 203. The appropriations voted by the first city council for the maintenance of schools in 1891 amounted to $54,000. The city's appropriation for school purposes in 1915 was $252,000.
An important share of the duty of providing free education for the youth of Pittsfield was assumed in 1897 by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who opened a free academy at the convent on North Street in September of that year. Two years later, in 1899, the building of the St. Joseph's Parochial School was erected on First Street, containing ten classrooms, and an assembly hall. Begin- ning its sessions there in September, 1899, the school had an
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enrolment during its first year of approximately 470 pupils, and its work has been of increasing value and usefulness to the com- munity. The enrolment for the school year 1914-1915 included 688 pupils, arranged in nine grades and a high school, where the course was one of four years' instruction. In effect, the courses of study have conformed to those afforded by the public schools maintained by the city. The principals and teachers have been the Sisters of St. Joseph; and the successive principals have been Sister M. Irene (1899), Sister Clara Agnes (1900), Sister St. Thomas (1905), Sister M. Irene (1911), and Sister M. Raphael (1914).
In 1876 the famous private school for girls at Maplewood, having been known for twenty years as Maplewood Institute, was slowly expiring, although the courageous and somewhat pathetic struggle to keep it alive was not abandoned until 1884, when a school met for the last time within the walls which had sheltered an academical institution since 1827. Rev. Charles V. Spear had become its sole owner in 1864 by purchasing the land and buildings for $27,000. The scholars, many of whom came from distant parts of the country, then numbered 200, and both in popularity and educational value the Institute was the equal of any girls' school in New England. Immediately, however, the shadow of evil fortune began to enshroud it. Two invasions of its buildings by epidemic disease, in 1864 and 1866, weakened public confidence. Having partly regained its pres- tige, the school with 150 pupils in 1873 was so staggered by the financial panic of that year that thereafter its decadence was never again checked, and competition with its rivals at Pough- keepsie and Northampton was out of the question. In 1883, Mr. Spear, who seems gallantly to have expended his mental and physical energy in the losing fight, leased the institution to Louis C. Stanton, a member of his teaching staff. Mr. Stanton's endeavor was soon concluded. The property then was presented by Mr. Spear to Oberlin College in Ohio, with the hope, perhaps, that the college might be able to revive the fame and prosperity of the Institute. This the collegiate authorities were unwilling to attempt. In 1887 they leased the establishment to Arthur W. Plumb, who transformed it into a summer hotel. For a
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similar purpose it had been utilized by evanescent tenants for several previous seasons. Mr. Plumb purchased the land and buildings in 1889.
The Maplewood Association, composed of alumnae of the Institute and organized in New York City in 1900, cherishes warmly the memories and spirit of the school. It held its first annual reunion at the present Maplewood on June seventh, 1900.
Rev. Charles V. Spear died, May tenth, 1891, at Constanti- nople. He was born in the town of Randolph, now Holbrook, Massachusetts, November thirteenth, 1825, and was graduated in 1846 from Amherst College. Soon after graduation he came to Pittsfield to teach at the Institute, then conducted by Rev. Wellington Hart Tyler, and to study theology under Rev. John Todd. He was licensed to preach in 1851, and for three years was in charge of a church at Sudbury, Massachusetts, but he resumed his connection with the school at Maplewood at about the time when Rev. J. Holmes Agnew became its proprietor, in 1854. Mr. Spear was for thirty years a helpful citizen of Pitts- field, and served the community as president of the Library As- sociation and as a trustee of its successor, the Berkshire Athe- naeum. He was a cultured man, of high and pure ideals. In his later years, he fell heir to a large estate and was a generous benefactor of Oberlin College, to which he gave a library and a supporting endowment; of the latter, the Maplewood property was a part.
The Institute was reanimated in 1867 by the advent of Ben- jamin C. Blodgett as head of the department of music; indeed, that department was judged to be the chief attraction of the school. Mr. Blodgett, however, seceded in 1878, and established a music school of his own on Wendell Avenue, in the house built by Gen. William Francis Bartlett. By his work there, as well as at Maplewood, Mr. Blodgett, stimulated in the town of his time a fondness for good music, of which the influence may be said still to linger. In 1881, he left Pittsfield to accept the duties of professor of music at Smith College. For some years, however, after he had ceased to be a resident of Pittsfield he was able to give to the pupils of Miss Salisbury's school on South Street the benefit of his talent for musical instruction and criticism.
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Miss Mary E. Salisbury, of Providence, Rhode Island, ac- quired in 1871 the ownership of the private school for girls which had been conducted in Pittsfield since 1845 by Miss Clara Wells. When its management was assumed by Miss Salisbury, who had becn Miss Wells's assistant, the school was housed in the brick building at the north corner of Reed and South Streets, which had sheltered a boys' boarding school from 1826 to 1852. Under Miss Salisbury's efficient, gracious, and affectionate direction, her school for girls prospered notably. In 1875 the building was en- larged, but it was not long before admission was sought annually by more scholars than could be accommodated. Nevertheless, Miss Salisbury, a firm believer in the personal element in educa- tion, quietly declined to allow the school to outgrow the sphere of her intimate supervision. A department of day scholars, which included young boys, was liberally patronized, and thus Miss Salisbury came to be endeared to many Pittsfield house- holds. In 1898, honored and beloved, she resigned her work, in which she had labored with rare singleness of purpose for more than twenty-five years.
Miss Salisbury's successor in the South Street building was Miss Mira H. Hall, who there opened her day and boarding school for girls in September, 1898. In 1889, an additional house was rented on Reed Street; in 1900, the school was moved to Elmwood, the former home of Edward Learned. Miss Hall, nine years afterward, purchased from the heirs of Col. Walter Cutting the house and residential property once occupied by Col. Cutting on Holmes Road, and there reopened her school in the fall of 1909. The pupils of her successful boarding school numbered seventy-five in 1915.
Of private schools for boys, Pittsfield was not fertile during the period surveyed by this volume. At Wendell Hall, Earl G. Baldwin for two years conducted a boys' school which was open- ed in 1881. In 1883, Rev. Joseph M. Turner established the St. Stephen's School for boys on Pomeroy Avenue, which after his death in 1887 was continued for a short time by Edward T. Fisher. From 1888 to 1893, Joseph E. Peirson was the proprie- tor and principal of a boys' school on West Housatonic Street. Arthur J. Clough, in 1895, opened the Berkshire School
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for boys. This was maintained until 1903. At first it occupied the former Theodore Pomeroy homestead on West Housatonic Street; in 1901, Mr. Clough moved his school to the building on South Street, recently occupied by the schools of Miss Hall and Miss Salisbury.
CHAPTER X
CHURCHES-I.
I N 1876 the community of Pittsfield and in particular its oldest religious society were still conscious of a peculiar sense of deprivation because of the loss by death in 1873 of an intel- lectual and religious leader so powerful as was Dr. John Todd. His ministry at the First Congregational Church had been one of thirty-one years. His fame through his writings was world- wide. Affectionately attached to Pittsfield, he had made his broad humanity a large part of the spiritual and social life of the town. It was not in his own pulpit, but at the South Congrega- tional Church, on June fifteenth, 1873, that Dr. Todd preached his last sermon. His immediate successors, in the parish which had known him so long and so proudly, were confronted by no ordinary task.
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