USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 22
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church had stood was transferred to the College in exchange for a sum which, with the insurance on the burned building, made possible the erection of a new church on College Street a little north of the old site.
This Classic Revival edifice with its 125' spire was designed by Mr. Hobart Upjohn of New York with Wells, Hudson and Granger of Hanover, associate architects. It was dedicated on No- vember 10, 1935, with services conducted by the Reverend Wil- liam Henry Spence, the church's minister.
The new "White Church" and Parish House, built as a single unit, are used by community groups as well as the Sunday School, Women's Association, Pilgrim Fellowship, and other organiza- tions of the church.
Since World War II, a number of new religious societies have emerged, growing from informal groups into definite church or- ganizations in several instances.
The Christian Scientists rented Stockbridge House on the corner of West Wheelock and School Streets for several months in 1949. Services were held on Sunday evenings and certain Wednesday evenings when the building was not in use by the Episcopalians, for whom it served as Sunday School and Parish House.
The Christian Science Society rented a hall in the Bridgman Building on Main Street for services from November 1949 until November 1954, when the group returned to the Stockbridge House where it has continued and which it purchased in 1960. "Christian Science Society, Hanover, New Hampshire" was ac- cepted by the Christian Science Board of Directors as a branch of The Mother Church, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Bos- ton, on March 1, 1951. "Christian Science Society, Hanover," was incorporated in January 1955 under the laws of the State of New Hampshire. The title, or name, was changed on January 28, 1961 to-"First Church of Christ, Scientist, Hanover, New Hamp- shire."
St. Thomas moved its church school and parish activities in 1954 from Stockbridge House to its new Milham House adjoining the church. This educational unit, designed by Mr. Stanley Or- cutt, was built in memory of Mr. Charles Gilbert Milham, Lay Reader for many years. At the same time renovations beneath the church itself created a hall for social gatherings which was named
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in honor of Professor William R. Gray, former Dean of Tuck School. A porch, designed by Mr. Frank Barrett, was added to the church in 1959. This entrance of Indiana limestone and granite from a Concord, New Hampshire quarry was made possible by funds given by the late Winifred Storrs Raven of Hanover.
The most recent church building in Hanover is that of the Chapel of our Saviour, Lutheran, on Summer Street which was dedicated on January 27, 1958. The chapel, contemporary in style, which serves both for worship and as a fellowship hall, was designed by E. H. and M. K. Hunter of Hanover and financed by the Atlantic District, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, to which the congregation belongs. Large granite blocks from "the old haunted house on the River Road" were used in the founda- tions, the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Stanhope.
Lutherans became active in the community about 1945 when the Reverend Darrell Helmers, pastor of the Enfield Community Church, was instrumental in gathering a group of Lutheran stu- dents and Hanover residents at the home of a Dartmouth profes- sor. The growth of the group led Mr. Helmers to petition the Atlantic District for a mission at Hanover. In 1955 the informal group became "The Chapel of our Saviour, Lutheran" with a missionary. Services were held at first in St. Thomas Episcopal Church, later in Rollins Chapel, the Grade School, and the Mus- grove Building before the mission moved to the present location in 1958. The mission was organized into a congregation the fol- lowing year, and the pastor, who had been serving as missionary, installed on January 31, 1960.
Changes in the churches at Hanover Center and Etna were also being made about the time that the Episcopalians and Lu- therans were in the midst of their building projects. Both the in- terior and exterior of the Congregational Church at the Center were painted and a heating system installed in 1958. At the Bap- tist Church in Etna the construction of Trumbull Hall, dedicated in January 1955 and named for Mr. W. H. Trumbull, greatly in- creased facilities for the various church organizations and com- munity activities.
Although Jewish residents of Hanover have never formed a congregation, many have attended services conducted by students at Dartmouth College. Occasionally High Holy Day Observances have been held in which residents of Hanover and neighboring towns have participated.
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The Churches of Hanover
Four Unitarian families whose main concern was Sunday School for their children were instrumental in organizing "The Unitarian Fellowship of Hanover," which was approved by the American Unitarian Association on November 6, 1955. In the beginning the children attended Sunday School in the basement of a private home and later moved to the present location in the Hanover Nursery School.
The Fellowship met every other Sunday evening in various college buildings for the first few years. Meetings are now held every Sunday in Rollins Chapel, sometimes for worship, some- times for discussion. In addition to providing leaders from its own membership, the group has invited ministers from Unitarian and Universalist churches in New Hampshire and Vermont to con- duct services and has had professors from the Dartmouth faculty and representatives from headquarters of the American Unitarian Association and the Unitarian Service Committee as speakers. An executive committee, elected annually, has general charge of the business affairs and control of the administration of the Fellow- ship.
Just as President Eleazar Wheelock "gathered" his church in his home in 1771 and as all the other churches started, so Hanover Friends (Quakers), the most recently organized religious group in Hanover, began with an informal meeting in a private home. Seven residents and two students met in October 1954 in the liv- ing room of a Dartmouth faculty member. Meetings for worship and fortnightly discussions continued until the following spring, when meetings for worship were transferred to the Dartmouth Christian Union Lounge in College Hall.
The group has grown with members and attenders coming from other towns on both sides of the river in the Upper Connecticut Valley. "The Hanover Monthly Meeting, Religious Society of Friends" was recognized by the New England Yearly Meeting on June 24, 1959. The Hanover Meeting and the Burlington (Ver- mont) Monthly Meeting constitute the Northwest Quarterly Meeting of the New England Yearly Meeting and meet together four times a year for worship and business. Concerns of the Han- over Meeting are under the care of the Clerk and assisting com- mittees.
Note: Further information regarding Hanover's Churches may be found in the Archives of Baker Library, Dartmouth College, or by consulting the pastors and clerks of the respective religious groups.
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19 Schools in Town and Village by Elisabeth and David Bradley
T HE first record we have of the Hanover schools dates from a time twenty years after the settlement of Hanover and refers to schools already in operation. The spare re- port of a town meeting in 1787 tells simply that Jonathan Free- man Esq., Deacon John Wright and Wm. Dewey were appointed a committee "to take care of the school Right in this town."
The "Worning" for Town Meeting three years later carried among other articles the following: "to see if the town will agree on any regular methord to Cary on Schooling." The need for a more formal administration of the schools came about because of a state law recently passed requiring both state and local support of public education; the community trained in the New Eng- lander's simple but effective ways of self-government, heeded the warning and "voted to raise £150 for the use of Schooling the Insuing Year to be paid Equal to wheat at 5/ per Bushal .. . " The money apparently was to be spent at the discretion of the "Committee."
This, to some members of the community, seemed to be too large a grant of power, for on April 2, 1790 the selectmen were handed a "pertition" signed by nineteen voters protesting against the committee and asserting that taxes were already so burden- some that this additional one could not be borne "without im- poverishing there Familyes to a suffering condition."
Upon receiving this remonstrance the Selectmen called an- other meeting, four weeks later, at which time the town voted to "disanul" the action raising £150. No further action in support of the school was taken: whether owing to the lateness of the hour, a snow storm, or hot tempers. But three weeks later a third meet- ing was called at which £100 was voted, including the "£30 which is Raised by the State." The petitioners were apparently satisfied that seventy pounds (or the equivalent in wheat) would not bring their families to a suffering condition, and the committee must have established itself as one of wise and prudent men, for the method of "laying out" the money was not changed. This is the
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earliest record we have of a dispute over the cost of education in Hanover. It was settled in the calm and civilized way of self-gov- erning people.
Meanwhile, as the village of Hanover grew, the land around it was settled, cleared, farmed, northward first, later to the east, over the hills, ultimately to the far side of Moose Mountain. New schools had to be established, school buildings built, teachers found, administrative machinery set up. By 1790 there were five districts in the town of Hanover, by 1807 there were twelve, by the middle of the century there were eighteen, the last one split off from District 11 when three families, deciding they had enough children between them and too far to travel, set up a school and built a schoolhouse of their own. This situation per- sisted, with each district a "little republic" unto itself, until 1885 when all schools (other than the District No. 1 school in the vil- lage) were consolidated under one board and called the Town District. Not until 1927 (and then mainly to qualify for state aid under a new Concord statute) did the Town District and District No. 1 merge and establish the present management by Superin- tendent and School Board.
Administration in those early school districts was simple, vol- untary, and generally adequate. A "School Committee" was elected at the district meeting. At first these committees consisted of three people, later the number was reduced to two and then one. It was sufficient. That man had only to oversee the general operation of the school. A warning posted usually on the door of the schoolhouse would at any time call the district together; there might be only one meeting a year, there might be several, depend- ing upon the business at hand.
We may take the following record, from District No. 3, as typical:
The legal voters of School District No. 3 of Hanover, met pursuant to previous notice given by committee Mar. 30, 1829, and organized their meeting by choosing Cyrus Chandler Moderator.
Voted and chose Jeremiah Chandler clerk.
Voted to have a school four months the summer ensuing.
Voted to leave it discretionary with their committee to have a teacher. Voted to furnish wood out of the publick money. Wood accordingly bid off by John W. Chandler at $1.45 per cord.
Voted to dissolve this meeting.
Attest
Jeremiah Chandler Clerk
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In addition to the School Committee (of one) there was usually a Prudential Committee (of one) whose job it was to hire teachers, see to the repairs of the building, and pay the bills.
While eruptions were frequent in the affairs of District No. 1, the outlying schools maintained themselves largely unmodified for nearly two centuries: they were good or poor depending upon teachers and upon the interest of the families in schooling. The schoolhouses were almost always of one large room, illuminated through its windows, heated by a fireplace in the early days, later by a proper wood-burning stove. The schoolmistress had her large desk, blackboard, books, flag. The smaller children sat on the benches, or at desks, nearest her while the larger ones occupied the rear seats. First grade to eighth were conducted simultane- ously: while the rest were working at assignments, one group would be up in the recitation seats next to the teacher. Anyone in the room might be called upon to answer a question. A "Roll of Honor" was often kept and published-the names of those who had perfect attendance.
The testing of the teacher's discipline was the annual preroga- tive of the larger boys, and stories of teachers being thrown from the windows are matched by those in which the teacher "threw to the floor" some obstreperous young man. Whispering was re- garded high among the deadly sins. But since whispering is to school boys what wetness is to water we can reasonably doubt the record claimed in District 2 that "not one had whispered during the term, a very uncommon fact."
School went on: the graduates went to work, a few went to high school in Lebanon or Hanover, whichever was nearer; they mar- ried and took their turns on school or prudential committees. The subjects taught were not called a "curriculum," and they were largely unchanged in two hundred years: reading, writing, num- ber work, grammar, spelling (with frequent public spelling bees), Bible readings, stories, history and civics, geography, declamation, a little Latin. The school together with the church was the center of the community's modest social life. It had to fit into the com- munity's economic life. For a long time there was a "winter school" of two or three months, and a "summer school" of four or five. Sometimes there were separate schools for "mails and fe- mails," as weather and farming allowed. Later, as the need for "longer schools" was recognized, there were three terms: spring, fall, and winter-varying in length as money and wood held out.
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In the spring the oldest students would present themselves to be examined, in public and orally, by "the committee" to see what they had learned and whether they were ready to be graduated.
The costs of running a district school in the early nineteenth century are given in figures too small to be grasped nowadays. Thus the record for District 3 in 1837 reads:
On school bill
$26.36
Publick money rec'd of D. Bridgeman
$13.25
Rec'd of Francis Woodward
$ .50
$40.11
Paid for summer school
$ 9.00
Paid for winter school
$17.00
Paid for washing schoolhouse
.33
Paid for glass and broom
.70
Paid for Wood
$ 2.47
Paid for boreting school mistress
$11.21
$40.11
Sometimes the school mistress was paid by the term, sometimes by the month. She might be given a stipend for "boarding" or she might be "boarded around" among the families in the district. Heat was a constant problem during the winter terms; the war- rants invariably contain an article about "wood" (whether it shall be paid out of taxes, or assessed among the several families in the community according to the number of children in school). One of the older school boys might be paid fifty cents for splitting the wood and building the fires for a term-or, as one of the rec- ords shows: "Paid to widow Hatch for making fires-$1.00." In any case the school mistress was expected to know how to handle an axe, build fires, draw water, shovel snow as she was expected to know how to handle almost everything else.
The buildings, of course, were as plain as the studies. They stood in the center of a trampled (and often muddy) play ground. There was always a flagpole outside, and in back a privy. Travel to the schools was on foot (barefoot in the warm months) and the boy who was old enough to drive down in his father's wagon or buggy was lord of all indeed and about ready to be married.
The problems of building, adding, rebuilding which have oc- cupied the records of District 1 in Hanover since 1808, were not less acute in the country because rural budgets and rural expec- tations were simpler. For example in the warning for the Rudds-
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boro District of 1856 we read: "Art. iii To see if the district will remove and fit up the present school house or build a new one and fix upon a location for the same."
The district voted to pass over this article and continued to do so each year until 1862, when after two meetings of deliberation they went so far as to engage a Mr. Abbott of Lyme to estimate the cost of a new house ($290) and of repairing the old one ($249). At a later meeting that year they voted to raise $200 to repair the old house and build a privy, and "to sell [i.e. contract out] all the materials to repair the schoolhouse in lots to the lowest bidder to be delivered on the spot by the 20th of June next." By the next summer the schoolhouse was completely renovated from stone underpinnings to ridgepole, the total cost being within forty-three cents of Mr. Abbott's estimate.
It would be easy to idealize the rural schools now that they have gone. They were often poor, crowded, dirty, noisy, ill-lit, and ventilated by Aeolus himself. Yet, strange to say, the hardy young- sters who grew up through such an environment (ignorant of the word "underprivileged") seem to remember best the kind of homespun adventures the school provided-adventures which don't get into school records and which may never come in mod- ern well-appointed classrooms.
One girl, recounting her years (1937-1946) in the Goss School (District 14) during the reign of Mertena Gardner, tells of things which only a child would recognize as being "education":
One of my most vivid memories is drinking from the clear cool brook that came running down the mountainside. Mert would come outside 10 or 15 minutes before recess time was over 3 times a day and announce it was time for drinks, whereupon we would go dashing up the North Peak of the Moose Mountain range to our familiar spots, lie down on tummies & drink & daydream at our own reflection, con- templating our own child universe until the bell in the doorway would remind us that school must go on.
Later when a small water cooler arrived from the big city of Han- over everyone was pleased with the novelty for about 3 days, then sadness set in over giving up the stream.
On those mornings when the fire was good, everyone would get out potatoes, brought from home, initial them with pencil & place them on the grate over the stove. Halfway through the morning, Mert would announce potato-turning time & everyone tended to his own. By noon they'd be just right to eat with a pat of home-made butter & dash of salt.
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The doings in School District No. 1 (in the village or "Pre- cinct" of Hanover, once called the Dresden District) have been distinctly different from those of the surrounding districts and de- serve special mention. Hanover Plain itself was never a typical New England town, growing out of a farm community into a vil- lage, establishing a church, stores, roads, and a school. In Hanover the school established the town-it was Moor's Indian Charity School, moved bodily from Connecticut, and thenceforth ap- pended to Wheelock's new Dartmouth College.
The first settler had been here only five years, the first town meeting held only three years, prior to the coming of Wheelock and his scholars, his wagons and his family. Town and College were one at the beginning and to a large extent have remained so. It is not surprising therefore that almost no records exist of the early years of the local public school: it was established by com- mon consent, its administration so well known as to require no special notice.
The District No. 1 school had begun in the earliest days as a part of the elementary department attached to the College under the name of Moor's School and designed for teaching Indians and other pupils preparing for college. The teachers were members of the faculty and upperclassmen of the College; the same instructors taught both the children and the older boys. The school was housed in the old college building until the Moor's Academy was erected in 1791, after which time it occupied that house. From 1803 to 1805 it was sheltered in "Little's Hall" on Main Street, but then returned to the Academy. Both College and village found this arrangement unsatisfactory, but it had the advantage of being inexpensive and served for two generations.
Finally in 1808, after a dispute over costs and site, the first schoolhouse was built on the knoll where the Christian Science Building, No. 1 School Street, now stands. The close connection with "Moor's School" and the College continued, however, a school mistress teaching the elementary subjects and the faculty and students teaching the college preparatory work.
For nearly a century the subjects taught were of the strict classi- cal type: reading, writing, arithmetic, music, spelling, grammar, geography in the lower grades; Greek, Latin, geometry, history, civics, rhetoric in the higher. As late as 1894 "school" consisted of four departments (Primary, Intermediate, Grammar, and High
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school) occupying one building and having only five regular teachers.
Whether such subjects constitute the basis of an education is as debatable now as it was in 1821 when a writer calling himself "Crito" (for reasons of authority or obscurity) published twenty essays in the Dartmouth Herald ranging from religious instruc- tion to corporal punishment. Who this lone and literary trump- eter was would be hard to guess: was he a scientist? ("Arithmetic may be very easily taught;" Geography "is the fittest for chil- dren.") Or an editor? ("Writing is an art seldom acquired in any perfection.") Or a "committee" pleading for better pay for the teachers? ("It is after all more the manner of teaching than the things taught that constitutes a good education.") Or a bleak and dangerous radical? ("English grammar is unsuitable for the study of children ... it requires a degree of judgement which they cannot be supposed to possess.")
Perhaps Crito was only a clown, or a parent asking that some consideration be given to the congestion then and chronically present in the classrooms:
Custom has generally established among instructors the practice of hearing two reading lessons by each pupil in every half day. But in a school of fifty it would enable the instructor to devote scarcely half a minute to the exercise of each individual. Now, nothing is more demonstrable than the utter impossibility of teaching the art of read- ing by lessons of a half a minute each.
The nineteenth century was the era of general elementary edu- cation "to prepare all the youth, rich or poor . . . in upright con- duct and practical religion" for successful farming or business. Subjects other than the "fundamentals" previously mentioned did not begin to be taught until the end of the century: physiology, physics, sometimes chemistry and botany when teachers and class- room space were concurrently available. French appears in 1894, and agitation for German. Laboratories, libraries, and algebra are in demand. Bookkeeping and stenography courses appear just prior to World War I. Home Economics, Shop, Physical Educa- tion, and School Lunches "for those whose weight is below normal" become part of the business of the schools in the twen- ties. In recent times full time "Guidance," "Problems of Democ- racy" and "Driver Training" have been added, along with the steady division of former courses into more specialized units.
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More than a hundred courses are now offered at high school alone.
We are now nearly done with the era of universal high school education. The first agitation by the "Superintending School Committee" for a high school in Hanover began in 1860, but it was not until 1888 that a regular high school was established, growing out of what had previously been "the higher depart- ment." It continued to occupy a room in the single brick build- ing on the north side of Allen Street erected in 1877, until 1914 when a separate high school building was put up on the south side of the same street. In 1930 only about half of the high school stu- dents stayed on to finish the four-year course; now the drop-out rate is under 1%-
What the children thought of having to go to school has prob- ably not changed in spite of better schoolhouses and a "curric- ulum." Their cheers were not recorded by the Committee when it reported in 1888 that "school closes one week earlier than usual this winter. A satisfactory reason has not been given, although among which are a lack of coal, a lack of ventilation, and Dutch measles."
The report, in 1852, that "whispering & every species of dis- order were triumphantly suppressed," again we may doubt, but we do not question the statement that the brow of the hill, and that wonderful sweep from School Street to the river, were
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