The Code of 1650 required any community in the Colony of Connecticut, once it reached a minimum of fifty households, to hire a schoolmaster to provide an education to its children.
While the residents of Easton – formally Weston until 1845 – always provided an education for their children, there are few records of the town’s earliest schools, students, teachers, and expenditures. Searching through the minutes of early town meetings gives us bits and pieces of information but doesn’t paint the entire picture, and unfortunately, the community never published an annual detailed town report until late in the nineteenth century.
With that in mind, we decided to begin our study of public education in our little town using the information compiled by the State Board of Education that began publishing its annual report to the governor in 1865.
The 1867 Beers map clearly shows the town of Easton was divided into thirteen separate school districts. Why so many? Logistics is the simple answer. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was simply no way a town the size of Easton could transport children from all over town to a central location where they could be educated. The roads were barely considered roads given their lack of regular maintenance. Snow in the winter and mud in the spring made traversing Easton’s byways nearly impossible for days on end. With no other means of getting the children to their school other than walking, the decision to build multiple schoolhouses in several areas of the community was the only viable option.
Although the town had thirteen districts, many of those districts bordered on the neighboring communities of Redding, Weston, Monroe, Trumbull, and Fairfield. Some of those districts became split districts with the other towns, and as a result, Easton ended up needing to build and maintain only eight separate schoolhouses.
The typical schoolhouse was approximately twenty feet wide and about thirty feet in depth. It would consist of one large classroom that sat behind a small vestibule where the students would store their winter coats and lunch pails. Heat was provided by a wood stove, often towards the center of the room with a stove pipe that went up, made a ninety degree turn and then ran down the center of the room before exiting the building. That pipe would carry the hot exhaust from the stove and radiate its heat throughout the room. Some schools had their own well that provided drinking water, while others relied on the well of a neighboring house where the town would usually pay the property owner a stipend for its use.
In many cases, one or two of the older boys would arrive at school early enough to set a fire in the stove and draw enough water from the well to fill a bucket where a single tin cup would be shared by all the students when a drink was needed. Outhouses were also the order of the day.
Early schools were open year-round, providing both a winter and summer session. Students could attend one or both sessions. Textbooks were available in extremely limited numbers and were usually donated by either the teacher or a local resident. The town didn’t purchase books in bulk, so each schoolhouse often had textbooks that differed from other schools within the same town. Prior to the late 1800’s, there were no official grade levels in most rural schools. Children learned at their own pace, beginning around the age of six and continuing their education until their teacher thought they had absorbed all the knowledge he or she could depart to them or until the child or the family decided they had learned enough to go out into the world. Most students were done with their schooling by the age of twelve or thirteen. Basic reading and writing along with a simple command of mathematics – addition and subtraction – were all that many children achieved. The need to enter the workforce was often paramount in an era when subsistence farming provided very little other than enough food to eat.
Early teachers were often only a few years older than their students. There were no tests or teaching certificates required to land a position as an educator in rural communities such as Easton. Nor was any form of higher education needed – either high school or college. The state established the first Normal School in New Britain in 1849. The curriculum was specifically designed to train the student to become a teacher. It was a two-year program where tuition was provided free of charge in exchange for the student signing an agreement to teach at a public school within the state for a minimum of two years after graduation. While many of the larger communities hired graduates of these normal schools, smaller towns such as Easton were hesitant to up their salaries enough to attract a qualified graduate with a degree. In Easton, if an applicant could convince members of the local school committee that they had the ability to discipline and teach children, they were usually hired.
The remuneration of educators in the mid-eighteenth century in towns like Easton was so low that about ninety percent of those taking the job were unmarried young women. The average monthly salary was approximately $20 and the time that it took to do the job left very little time to take care of a family or run a household, so most of the young women who taught school became boarders with a family that lived in close proximity to the school where they taught.
The 1874 Board of Education report to the governor indicated there were eight teachers employed in Easton: one for each of its one-room schoolhouses. During the winter session that year, four were male and four were female. When the summer session ran, only one teacher was male, the remainder were female. The men earned an average of $28.85 per month, while the women took home only $24.24 per month. In the late 1800’s, educators were only paid during the months they taught; that meant that those male teachers who taught from October to April only walked away with a little over $115. Such low pay would explain why those men likely worked in agriculture during the warmer months, where if they were fortunate enough, they could grow enough food for the entire year and perhaps sell enough additional foodstuffs, firewood, and hay to survive.
At the Historical Society of Easton, we have several diaries from between 1872 and 1876 that were written by a teacher by the name of Charles Thorp. They indicate the tremendous number of hours he worked hauling goods between Trumbull and Bridgeport, as well as cutting and selling firewood whenever he wasn’t teaching. Making ends meet on just the salary of an educator was just not possible.
Students also needed to work to help their families survive. That is reflected in the number of registered students who were regularly absent during the school year. For the 1874 winter session, there were one hundred and ninety-five students enrolled, but the average daily attendance was only one hundred and seventeen. During the summer, of the one hundred and sixty-two students who were registered, only ninety-nine attended on the average day. Thorp’s own accounts of “scholars” attending his school ranged between nine and forty on any given day. Planting and harvest times saw the greatest number of absentees. Luckily for those students, regular attendance, while preferred, wasn’t mandatory.
In 1884, Easton’s eight schools had an enrollment of one hundred and sixty-five children. That year, the State of Connecticut reimbursed the town a total of $247 in state funds to help educate them; about $1.50 per student. Depending on the district, each of Easton’s students cost between $28 and $30 to educate. The average daily attendance per school was between seven and eight students. Remuneration for each of the town’s educators had dropped to about $22 per month and none of Easton’s educators had attended an institute of higher learning.
Ten years later, enrollment in Easton’s schools had increased to two hundred and nine. However, by then, enrollment in districts that had not been changed to reflect the change in population within the town was disproportionately distributed. The Union District (Adams School) and Wilson Street (Black Roch Turnpike opposite Silver Hill Road) only had eighteen students each. Rock House (corner of Sport Hill Road and Rock House Road) and the Yellow School on Everett Road had fifteen and fourteen respectively. Judd (corner of North St, and Judd) had only ten enrollees. However, the Narrows district (now under the Easton Reservoir) had swelled to forty-six, while Center (Westport Road) and Aspetuck (Redding Road near Wells) had twenty-six and twenty-five apiece.
It was time for a change.
After the Staples Academy closed at the end of the nineteenth century, the town took the building over and began to consolidate some of the smaller outlying schools. Wilson, Rock House, and Judd were the earliest casualties. Closing those schools meant the town needed to provide transportation to the students who lived in those districts. At first, that was accomplished by hiring a couple of men with horse drawn wagons. The Narrows schoolhouse was replaced by a new two story, two room school on Flat Rock Road that took the name of the Sport Hill School.
With the state requiring an eight-grade curriculum by the latter days of the nineteenth century, most of Easton’s remaining schools required two rooms: one for grades one through four and the other for grades five through eight. By 1910, only the Academy, Sport Hill, Yellow, and Adams remained open.
Also, by 1910, the next level of education beyond the eighth grade was becoming more normalized and increasingly necessary as the nation became more industrialized and jobs more complicated. In 1911, only fifteen hundred and eighty Connecticut students completed all four years of public high school – a number that would increase to over fourteen thousand just prior to the beginning of WWII. One reason was obvious; only the larger towns and cities had invested in the construction of a high school. Easton was still in the beginning stages of contemplating the construction of a single centralized and consolidated grammar school. Building a high school was still nearly fifty years away.
By the end of WWI, Easton was transporting its high school aged children to Bridgeport where the town was paying the city tuition to educate any Easton teen who wished to continue his or her education. Throughout the 1920’s there were multiple town meetings and much discussion about building a new grammar school with a separate room for each grade. That finally occurred in 1930, when the Samuel Staples Elementary School was built on Morehouse Road. When it opened, the remaining one and two room schoolhouses were shuttered for good, and the old Staples Academy building was turned back over to the trustees.
A February 1, 1932, letter addressed to the school board was signed by thirteen Easton high schoolers who complained that the bus the town was paying to transport them to Bridgeport’s Central High School had been designed to hold only twenty-six, but they numbered thirty-eight! They politely requested that the board add another bus. Easton would continue to bus its high schoolers to Bridgeport until 1959 when the Joel Barlow Junior and Senior High School was built in Redding in conjunction with that town.
Remarkably, five of the town’s original nineteenth century schoolhouses remain standing. The Historical Society of Easton owns and maintains the 1850’s Adams Schoolhouse it restored in 1970, and it helped save the Wilson School after the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company decided to give it up. The Wilson school is now part of a larger residence on Kachele Street, while the Sport Hill, Yellow, and Rock House schools have all been either remodeled or incorporated into residential structures.
