The Management of Early Schools

While school districts were largely self-governing, they were subject to town oversight and a growing body of state regulation on the qualifications of teachers. There were two bodies established during this period to oversee the operation of Nelson’s schools: The Prudential Committee and the Superintending Committee.  These committees seem not to have existed simultaneously and made reports to the town suggesting that their functions were nearly the same.  In their reports we learn what was being taught in the schools and read opinions about the quality of that teaching.  These committees also presented rules of school conduct for consideration at town meeting.

Reproduced below is such a report for 1829

DistrictTeacher# SchollarsArithmetikGrammarGeographyHistoryRhetoricLatin# weeksBudget
1Jonas Whitney58182010110$77.63
Ursula Newell354116116
3Jonas Whitney4315215118$59.44
Saphrona Whitney290101110
4Breed Batchellor552511810$73.33
Saphrona Whitney410389
5Nehem. Cutter491415117$49.08
Saphrona Herrick3305219
6Charles Manson36101037$32.55
Amoret Wild265637
7Benj. Frost40161399$62.40
Lois Hardy2607210
8Breed Batchellor47148168$53.79
Lois Whitney3601168
9John Perry2911535$47.00
Louisa Morse243528
Total Winter357
Total Summer250

There was a report on the performance of each school.  The comments for School Number Seven reads as follows:

No. 7  taught [sic] by Mr. Frost made a degree of improvement but not so much as we expected from the Teacher’s good qualities and easy manner of instructing there being a manifest want of discipline.

It is worth drawing some other conclusions from this report. The school population reflects the still very large number of children among the farm families in Nelson. Three hundred-fifty seven of Nelson’s eight hundred and seventy-five residents were attending school. The length of the school terms varied greatly from one district to the next.  Each district did set its own schedule.  Winter school was invariably taught by masters and summer schools by mistresses. Winter schools were one and a half times better attended than summer schools. Few summer schools taught arithmetic.

The records of school Number Seven reveal that mistresses were paid routinely $1 per week while their male counterparts  were paid $3. Most of the mistresses employed by school #7 had local surnames, but only one master did.  The 1840 budget illustrates this.

The above budget summary for 1840 shows a total school budget of $67.98 They paid Amanda Farwell, a local woman, $9.32 for teaching 7 weeks and Harvey Wardwell $22.92 for seven weeks – two and a half Mistress Farwell’s rate.

After 1840 the district employed only mistresses. Their stipends edged up and they achieved the $3 per week level occasionally by the end of the record in 1858.  Were masters harder to get? Did the qualifications of the mistresses improve?  The district didn’t actually save money; it no longer had lower paid summer teachers.

District Number Seven elected a member of the Superintending Committee to represent it. One such committee of which Benjamin Buckminster was the member from School Number Seven drew up a set of Bye Laws for Nelson schools in 1824 that was adopted at town meeting. The committee wrote 24 rules. Five dealt with discipline expected in classrooms.  These four are illustrative:

  1. It shall be the duty of the Instructor to examine his scholars once a week at least in the several branches, which they are studying, and to inculcate in his school the principles of morality and the necessity of a decent behavior.
  2. The scholars shall at all times treat their Instructor with respect, shall behave with decency and propriety, shall use no profane or obscene language when going to or returning from school or in or about the school house.
  3. When the Instructor approaches the schoolhouse the scholars shall retire into their seats and respectfully rise when the Instructor enters and shall not afterwards leave their places without leave of the Instructor.
  4. There shall be no whispering, laughing or playing or other unnecessary disturbance in school nor shall there be any playing cards or any other gaming plays in intermission time.

The final rule threatened the heavy hand of the town if a school wasn’t measuring up:

The Selectmen shall not appropriate the school tax towards the support of any school taught by an Instructor who shall not have complied with the above regulations.

It was too much; the town rescinded them all the next year.

Related Articles

(click title to read the article)

An Early Nelson School

Settlement in Nelson had increased remarkably in the years immediately after the revolution increasing from 186 in 1776 to 721 by the first national census in 1790.  With that growth came things that made settlements, proper towns: things like schools. In an era when we worry about dwindling school enrollment in our town of seven hundred, it is ironic to think back to 1790 when Nelson (then Packersfeld) had seven hundred and twenty-one inhabitants and a surfeit of students.

Building School #7

In the late nineteen-nineties it took the Nelson School District three years to design, achieve political support for and build an addition to the Munsonville School. In 1821 School District Number Seven faced similar issues and dealt with the inadequacies of the old wooden building in a matter of months.

Heating a One Room Schoolhouse

The subject of heating the building consumed approximately one third of the written record of early school district meetings. In 1820 men bid to keep the fire at the school at $1.00 per week.  Five different men supplied both wood and fire lighting for that 8-week winter school session. It is quite a modern idea: subcontract a whole function. In this case heat.

Ichabod Crane, Who Built Your Schoolhouse

When I took over as Treasurer of the Nelson School years and years and years ago, I also took over a large beat-up carton of old school papers – receipts, vouchers, etc. – which had been tossed higgledy-piggledy into the carton. Eventually I bundled all these together and tossed them higgledy-piggledy into a new carton and left them for the next treasurer to cope with.

Nelson’s One Room Schools

Settlement began in Nelson, then called Packersfield, in 1767. The first town meeting was held in 1772 but it was not until 1785 that the town voted to raise thirty pounds to support a “reading and writing school."

School #4

Brick school was built here and served the mill village of Munsonville until the Munsonville School as built in 1891.

School #7

D-2-12 School #7 This was one of nine schools built by Nelson in 1789-1790. It served the families in the southeast quarter of the town and was located “on the road between Captain James Bancroft’s house and Dublin”. This one-room schoolhouse, originally built [...]

The Center School (reflections from this student)

There were as many as seven one-room schoolhouses, of which the current Nelson town office (known as the Brick Schoolhouse) served as one, in Nelson from 1838 through the spring of 1945. Ethan Tolman submitted this article in January, 2019, shortly before he died on February 20 of that year. At the end of the very cold day, the other children left to walk home. Miss Stewart and I waited, and waited, as she got more nervous. "Well, Ethan," she said, "let's call your house." So, we walked next door to the Quigley's (where the library is now) and found Mrs. Quigley on the phone to Gordon, who had called. Fortunately, the Quigleys had recently got a phone – I think by only a few months. (None were installed during the war, of course.) His information was that the car would not start, and he had been unable to contact anyone who was both home and whose car would start. So, Miss Stewart and I set out for home. By the time we got to Tolman Pond we were both cold, and Miss Stewart suggested we go in and get warm. So, we went in, Sadie (Barry Tolman’s grandmother) gave us a hot drink and a fresh off-the-stove doughnut, and we soon were ready to head home, where my mother did much the same. Finally, someone thought to look at the temperature: minus 36 degrees F. That's the coldest I have seen in Nelson.

The Management of Early Schools

While school districts were largely self-governing, they were subject to town oversight and a growing body of state regulation on the qualifications of teachers. There were two bodies established during this period to oversee the operation of Nelson’s schools: The Prudential Committee and the [...]

2020-12-11T23:17:00+00:00Government, Rick Church, Schools|

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

FacebookTwitterRedditLinkedInTumblrPinterestVkEmail
Copyright Nelson History Roundtable
Toggle Sliding Bar Area
Go to Top