One-Room Schoolhouses of Middlesex County

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 Middlesex County city or town!  If you know of one-room schools in Middlesex County, please let us know.  Feel free to use the list of questions to the right as a guide.