One-Room Schoolhouses in Central New York State

by Howard Sibley

The schoolhouse story in our last newsletter brought in a lot of feedback, including this report from a reader in New York. This is an interesting topic from a historical point of view, but perhaps there is a little more to it for those of us in education who sometimes wonder whether — even if we can’t go back to the one-room schoolhouse days — we should try to bring a little of that one-room mentality back into modern schooling (minus the lack of electricity and running water).
Please feel free to submit schoolhouse stories of your own!

The one-room schoolhouse story in the July 2006 edition of “Common Knowledge” piqued my interest. The sketch of the schoolhouse reminded me of a school I saw when I lived in Maine. As I tried to find more about that school in Maine, I discovered an even more compelling story about schools in central New York where I currently live. The following is a brief account of what I have been able to piece together.

The New York story begins with the establishment of a military tract in the central part of the state. Congress had estimated that, to fight the British for independence, it would need eighty-eight battalions. New York’s quota was four regiments, but it could only muster two. To raise the additional regiments, New York State offered a total of six hundred acres of “bounty land” to each volunteer. All such land to be taken from vast territory within central New York. In the end, the total requisition of Military Tract land totaled approximately 1.7 million acres.

Twenty-eight townships were formed in central New York. Each township had one hundred lots of six hundred acres each. For a given township, ninety-four lots were reserved for soldiers and six were reserved for schools, churches, and special commercial buildings. Within the rural towns of the military tract the one-room schoolhouse materialized as Governor George Clinton pushed for expanded education for all communities in the state. The law stated that the land should be developed “for the purpose of encouraging and maintaining schools in the several cities and towns within this State in which the children of the inhabitants of the State shall be instructed in the English language, or be taught English grammar, arithmetic, mathematics, and such other branches of knowledge as are most useful and necessary to complete a good English education.”

By 1855 in Cayuga County alone there were 245 one-room schoolhouses of varying structures, including 12 stone, 21 brick, 202 wood-framed, 2 of log, and 8 of plank. Salaries for teachers in those schools were $40/term for men and $20/term for women. All were subjected to the code of conduct shown in Fig.1.

Fig. 1 – Teacher’s Rules

Fig.2 shows the interior of a typical wood-frame school. This one, in Victory, New York, had no electricity, no running water. Privies were initially located inside the buildings, but as time went on most were relocated as attached outbuildings.

          
Fig. 2 – Typical One Room Schoolhouse

Fig. 3 illustrates a brick schoolhouse erected in 1861 and used until 1939. Today it is used as polling and meeting places for organizations. When volunteers were remodeling the interior of this school they found that an old blackboard was really a lathes-and-plaster wall in which the plaster was made extra smooth with a trowel and painted black.

Fig. 3 – Brick Church Road Schoolhouse

In 1938 there were 160,000 one-teacher schools still operational across the United States, but at that time they were decreasing at the rate of five thousand a year as consolidation went into effect. In a 1936 editorial by the publisher of The Citizen (Cato, NY) the following commentary was made about the role of the one-room schoolhouse as consolidation loomed:

“We do not decry the one-teacher school. It has performed its task in a splendid manner and we know of no more heroic figure in the social life of any community than the brave little woman, who undertakes the management of a one-teacher school, usually without much compensation, either in the way of cash or appreciation. However, thousands of one-room schoolhouses can be eliminated by consolidation improving the physical plant layout and providing more teachers with equal ability.”

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