Schools of Old Southampton

by Mrs. Edward P. White | 1932

 

from Southampton Magazine | c 1913

EARLY SCHOOLS—The settlers established a school soon after they moved from Old Town to the present village. Richard Mills was Schoolmaster in 1651. He was also town clerk and hotelkeeper. He earned many an extra penny writing wills and deeds and letters for people. The first schoolhouse that we know about was built in 1664, and the Town meeting that year orders that there “shall be a schoolhouse 20 ft. long and 15 ft. wide at the town’s charge and finished fit for use before winter.” This schoolhouse stood on Jagger Lane and probably had a fireplace at each end. Like the church, it was swept once a week and sometimes scrubbed by the girls of the school. In these days, no law compelled a parent to send a child to school. Few girls attended. They often learned to read and write at home, making letters in tiny cross-stitch on the beautiful samplers, which we have from our great grandmothers. One lies before me worked by a little girl of twelve years. The letters, small and capital, are carefully formed, and the motto worked in dainty stitches,

“!Tis education forms the tender mind,

Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”

Girls in those days learned their domestic science and domestic art from their mothers at home and left the “book learnin’” largely to the boys. The teacher in the new school was paid $175.00 (thirty-five pounds a year) and he was allowed only “12 days in ye year for his own particular occasions.” The hours were eight A.M. to eleven A.M., and one P.M. to five P.M. The three R’s—Readin’, Writin’, and ‘Rithmetic—were, as the old rhyme goes, “Taught to the tune of a hickory stick.” One of the first rules of education in the school, as in the home, was “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

The schoolhouse was unpainted with board seats fastened to wooden benches. Each pupil brought his daily stick of wood, and the fire was started each morning by live coals from the nearest house. Just before the recess in the morning, two boys were sent next door to get a pail of water, and the gourd dipper passed from mouth to mouth with no one fearing germs from that ancient drinking fountain.

EARLY SCHOOL BOOKS—The earliest books used in the school were hornbooks. A hornbook was a thin piece of wood with a printed piece of paper on it. On the paper were the alphabet and simple sound combinations: a-b=ab, e-b=eb, etc.—a book of only one page with a thin sheet of yellow horn across it. A hole in the wooden handle made a place for a string, and the book was often carried around the neck. There were few books in the school. The New England Primer with its alphabet rhymes served the purpose of all the readers we have today. The A B Cs were taught first to rhymes like these:

            A – In ADAM’S fall we sinn-ed all.

            B – Thy life to mend this BOOK attend.

            C – The CAT doth prey and after slay.

A tiny picture followed each rhyme. A was a man; B was the Bible; C was a cat ready to catch a mouse. The children always liked Z—“Zaccheus he did climb a tree His lord to see.” In the back of the book was the Lord’s prayer and rhymes like this:

            Birds in their little nests agree

            And ‘tis a shameful sight

            When children on one family

            Fall and quarrel and fight.

All wrote with quill pens. Each child had to take his own goose quill to school, and it was the teacher’s duty to keep the quill sharp. They used homemade ink. Do you remember the mottos George Washington used to write in his copybook? “Labor to keep alive in your breast that divine spark called conscience” was one of them. Then they did their sums; addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Here is an old rhyme the children used to say:

            Multiplication is vexation,

            Division is as bad,

            The rule of Three it puzzles me

            And fractions make me mad.

NORTH AND SOUTH END SCHOOLS—The next schoolhouse stood on the corner of Main Street and Nugent Street, only there was no Nugent Street then. The schoolhouse was a long one-story building with a fireplace at each end. Here, our great grandfathers and grandmothers studied the queer old schoolbooks, which we find in our attics today. This schoolhouse must have been a large one, for we read that when the district was divided into North and South End, the schoolhouse was cut in two and made into two buildings. The South End School stood on Job’s Lane where the old firehouse is, and the North End School stood on Windmill Lane, south of the place where the Bethel Church is now. These were called district schools and were free to all children under twenty-one, living in either district.

The littlest children went to the Dame School. This was a private school kept by a woman. Miss Sayre kept a Dame School in a little house that stood on the triangle in Bowden Square, and in later years Mrs. Jane Proud kept one in a low house on the hill where the Grammar School has stood in recent years. One of her puils has told us much about Mrs. Proud. She was “a widow lady and always wore a black dress and steel spectacles and was always knitting a blue stocking. She had a stick that weighed seventy-five pounds. At least, that is the way it felt to me. I always wondered how she could knit that blue stocking and also see us whisper at the same time.” To the New England Primer, this later generation of children added “The Child’s Guide” and “Peter Parley’s Geography,” with its wonderful poetry:

            The world is round and like a ball

            Is swinging in the air,

            The atmosphere is round it all

            And stars are shining there.

Mrs. Proud’s low one-story house has long since made way for the Grammar School, and of all the little girls and boys who sat on the low benches and studied Peter Parley’s Geography and read The Child’s Guide and wrote in the copybooks and played at recess on the hill—not one remains. Their names are in the stones in the old North End graveyard across the street.

After Mrs. Proud’s day, Miss Amanda Halsey kept a private school for little girls in her home. Her father, Captain Harry, had an apple orchard, which grew south of the house. The girls were forbidden to pick the apples from the trees. They obeyed very carefully the letter of the law, but found a way to get the fruit by climbing the trees and eating the apples from the stem.

The Southampton Academy was built in 1831, when the town had grown so large that a high school seemed necessary. East Hampton had built Clinton Academy in 1795, the first high school in New York State. These were private schools, where boys and girls had to pay for their schooling. There was no graduating from the district school. One day your father said, “Thomas, take your books and go down to the Academy,” and willy-nilly you went. No Regent’s Examination to pass for entrance! Peter Parley’s Geography and Saunder’s Fourth Reader and Smith’s Arithmetic were left behind; you studied History and Grammar and Algebra and maybe Latin and became a proud “Academy Shoat.” A few of the boys went to college and became ministers or doctors or lawyers. The old Academy stood on the corner of Main Street and Job’s Lane, where Rogers Memorial Library stands today. It was moved to make a place for the Library and is standing, The Elks’ Clubhouse on Monument Square.

UNION FREE SCHOOLS—In 1891, the North and South End Schools joined and formed a union school. The new schoolhouse on Windmill Lane, housing all grades and the new high school, was considered a very large building then, and people forty years ago little dreamed that we should ever need the large schoolhouse that became necessary in 1913. And what would the first schoolmaster, Richard Mills, say to the still larger schoolhouse now ready for use in 1933?

FATE OF RICHARD MILLS—FIRST SCHOOLMASTER—Poor Richard Mills, our first schoolmaster in Southampton—probably the first English schoolmaster in the Province of New York. He left Southampton in 1657, and went to the Dutch settlements where he was declared by Peter Stuyvesant to be the “Ringleader of the English.” He was thrown into prison. From prison he wrote a piteous letter to the Dutch Governor, saying he “had been tenderly brought up,” and that “the prison fare endangered [his] health and life.” This was true, for the old English account tells us that, “His imprisonment caused his death, which happened soon after his release.” Such was the sad fate of the first schoolmaster of the Town of Southampton.