Figure 1. View of Greek Revival School House, Washington District, Hartford, Connecticut (Henry Barnard, architect)
The Greek Revival architecture of the American one-room school is a symbolic reflection of our national democratic ideals. More than one hundred and fifty years ago reformers and educators began to claim that the schoolhouse was fundamental to the education of our nation’s young. One of the most prominent school reformers of the nineteenth-century, Henry Bernard, stated that “Every schoolhouse should be a temple, consecrated in prayer to the physical, intellectual, and moral culture of every child in the community and be associated in every heart with the earliest and strongest impression of truth, justice, patriotism and religion.” By the 1820’s, our nation’s emerging prominence as a democratic republic coupled with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution helped to create the conditions which led to the common school movement. In the three decades before the Civil War, Americans looked to Ancient Greece as their inspiration. [Read More]
Help add to this list of one-room schools by Essex County city or town! If you know of one-room schools in Essex County, please let us know. Feel free to use the list of questions to the right as a guide.
My family used to live in a converted one room school house in Ipswich, MA that had been moved from its original site to 1 Highland Avenue in the 1930’s by a family named Dolan. We lived in it from the late 40’s to mid-60’s. When we lived there you could still see where the old desks and chairs had been bolted to the hardwood floors and it still had 9 foot ceilings that couldn’t be lowered any more because they hit the tops of the windows. The entry way still had the full height ceilings of about 13 foot. You may want to check that out and see if the information I have, which was oral history from my parents, is true. Several of our neighbors used to say they went to school in it but I can’t say how accurate that is.
Thanks Bill – fascinating story, and thank you for sharing. Do you have any idea where the building may have been originally?
I believe it was in Lord’s Square next to the Nurse’s Seminary. It’s the only one I saw that had the round window in the front eve and had been moved in the early 1930’s which is when I was told the house was moved by the Doyan’s to the current location on Highland Ave. But no one can confirm that.