Radio Script #1090

Little Talks on Common Things
June 6, 1976

I am often asked for information about old Waterville schools. The buildings erected for school purposes in the early 19th century have long ago disappeared.

We know that as early as 1796 one was built in what is now the City Hall Common. In fact, the pioneer settler Obadiah Williams gave that land to the Town of Winslow, of which Waterville was once a part, for the purpose of seeing erected on it a meetinghouse and a schoolhouse. The meetinghouse was the large building torn, down about thirty years ago and then known as the Armory. In it, when first built, were held church services, town meetings, and other public gatherings. After the opening of City Hall early in this century, the old building became used for the militia, although as late as 1930, I attended a political caucus in that old East Meetinghouse.

The schoolhouse was a small wooden building also on the Common. When, soon after Waterville became a separate town in 1802, the system of school districts was established, the schoolhouse on the Common became the property of District No.1, more often called the Ticonic Village District.

For most of the 19th century, the one-room district schoolhouse cared for most pupils even in rapidly growing towns like Waterville. In fact, those neighborhood schools proliferated so fast that by the time of the Civil War Waterville had 17 school districts. Each was autonomous so far as owning the district schoolhouse, hiring the teacher and fixing the salary, setting the number of weeks for each term, and other matters now entrusted to a central board of education. Each school district was financed as follows.

The town raised a certain sum at annual town meeting for support of schools. Compared with our school costs today running well into seven figures, the amount in the early days was small. When the town was eight years old in 1810, Waterville raised only $1,200 for support of all its schools. Not until 1820, the year that Maine became a state, did Waterville’s school appropriation reach $2,000.

The town fathers determined the number of children between the ages of 4 and 21 in each school district and divided the appropriation among all the districts according to that population. The age of four may have been early for school attendance but it was not unknown. An old diary tells us in the 1840s, there were two four year olds enrolled in the Webb district on the Webb road near the Sidney line. Does the age of 21 sound too old for a school course? Much more common than 4 year olds in the one-room schools in the winter term were the 21 year olds . Schools then had what were called summer, fall and winter terms, though before 1860, each term was held for only a few weeks, sometimes as few as six. Boys were needed on the farms in summer and fall, so many a Waterville boy, after he became old enough to do a day’s work on the farm, seldom attended the summer and fall terms, but went to school only in the winter. No wonder that attendance for only one short term a year made it necessary for a boy to keep going for that one annual term until he was 21 years old.

An oft-mentioned schoolhouse of mid-nineteenth century Waterville was the brick school, situated on College Avenue where the American Legion building now stands. Quite early a school was located on Water Street near Redington, and about 1890 was put up the building that still stands, long known as the Redington Street School, now occupied by the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Soon after the Civil War there was agitation for more schools within the limits of the more settled part of Waterville known as Ticonic Village. At first, a town meeting voted for one new schoolhouse, but the committee appointed to build it could not agree upon a site. There was strong agitation to place it in the west-central part of town, and equal agitation to put it somewhere in the north end. The result was another town meeting, where it was voted to build two schoolhouses, one at the corner of Pleasant and School Streets, where an earlier one-room schoolhouse had been torn down, the other on Upper College Avenue. The latter, now converted into an apartment house, still stands nearly opposite the Sunset Home, and it is the oldest schoolhouse still standing in Waterville. A solid brick structure, it has withstood well the wear and tear of the years.

When I came to Waterville in 1923, most of the old schoolhouses had disappeared. At that time the newest building was the Junior High School which had opened the year before on the site of Waterville’s first high school, which succeeded the old elementary school at the corner of Pleasant and School Streets. Built about ten years earlier was the high school, in 1923 called the Senior High School, on Gilman Street. The largest elementary schools at that time were the North Grammar, where the YMCA is now located, and the South Grammar, still in use on Gold Street. Even newer than the two so-called grammar schools, were the Myrtle Street and Walnut Street schools, both in the north end. Older wooden buildings were the Western Avenue School, just around the corner from Elm Street, and in the south end were the Redington School and Grove Street Schools, while on Upper Main Street was the Brook Street School.

It is possible there existed as late as 1923 one or more one-room rural schools in outlying parts of Waterville, but by that time the practice of transporting pupils to more central schools had already begun, so such little schools could not have lasted much after 1923.

Two of the schools long abandoned, but remembered by natives of Waterville still living, were the Marston School near what is now the south end of Johnson Pond on Mayflower Hill, and the Oakland Street School near the corner of Cool Street. Some interesting facts have recently come to my attention about the Myrtle Street School. When Dr. Abbott Smith allowed me to examine the diaries of his grandparents, Professor and Mrs. Samuel K. Smith, I discovered that the city bought from that Colby professor the land on which to build the Myrtle Street School. When Professor Smith became a member of the faculty of Waterville College (now Colby) in 1850, he bought from the college the house first occupied by an earlier professor, Calvin Newton, directly across College Avenue from the south end of the old Colby campus, so that when Chaplin Street was built, it ran close to the Newton house. Later Prof. Smith bought a large lot farther up College Avenue, and on the south end of that lot, at the top of a knoll rising on the west side of the avenue, he built a fine new home. Afterward a new street, Abbott Street, crossed south of that house.

I have said that Prof Smith’s lot was large. It extended a long distance up the avenue and well back toward Drummond Avenue. So he agreed to sell a piece at the north end of his lot for a new school. The Myrtle Street School was the result. That happened when Prof. Smith was an aged man, already retired from active duty at the college for eight years.

More information about the Myrtle Street School comes from a scrapbook kept near the beginning of this century by the mother of Mrs. Harriet Eaton Rogers. That mother took pains to keep numerous newspaper clippings about the public service of her well known husband Harvey D. Eaton.

One such clipping dealt with Mr. Eaton’s report in 1900 as chairman of the Waterville School Committee. Mr. Eaton said: “On Myrtle Street we have a splendid new building erected at a cost of $13,000 and capable of accommodating 300 pupils, but it is only 25 feet from the street to the schoolhouse, affording entirely inadequate playground. ”

Mr. Eaton went on to describe other Waterville schools in 1900. “In the south end of the city we have overcrowding, poor heating and poor ventilation, bad sanitary arrangements, and inconvenient location of buildings. For the South Plains School (Grove Street) we have had to hire additional rooms in a neighboring house. A new South Grammar building at least equal to Myrtle Street, is an immediate necessity. The present south grammar building is a cheap wooden structure on the north side of a hill facing the north, with street lines within 20 feet of two sides and the lot line only two feet from the north side. A stable and hog pen are only ten feet away. The city owns a lot on Summer Street admirably located to accommodate all the pupils in the whole southern section of the city. The brick schoolhouse on College Avenue has now been abandoned for three years.” That gives us the date of closing the old school on Upper College Avenue opposite the Sunset Home as 1897.

Mr. Eaton continued: “It has been suggested that a new high school may soon be erected, and the present high school at the corner of Pleasant and School streets can be used as a grammar school. That would not be wise. Not only is population growing rapidly elsewhere in the city, but also the present high school has been standing for fifty years and is utterly unfit for pupils of any age. When that building was erected, what are now the two communities of Waterville and Oakland had together only 4,000 people. Now Waterville alone has 9500.”

Mr. Eaton’s final word was about responsibility for money. He said: “When we consider that $30,000 of the city’s money is entrusted to the school committee to use with their judgment and discretion, we must realize that its wise expenditure demands our best and noblest efforts.”

Think of it – instead of the seven figure appropriation in millions that our schools enjoy today, 75 years ago there was spent annually on all of Waterville schools only $30,000. Since I first knew the Waterville schools as a resident of the city more than half a century has elapsed. Those years have brought fewer but larger buildings, massed consolidation, and tremendously increased transportation. Instead of the ten school buildings of 1923, only six now house a much larger total school population: Senior High School, Junior High School, and four elementary schools – South Grammar, Averill, Pleasant Street, and Brookside. But what splendid facilities, not dreamed of in 1923, are our newer schoolhouses. Already the present junior high school, which building is the much enlarged former high school of 1920, is overcrowded, and we shall soon see on the West River Road an entirely new, modern junior high school.

The expansion and progress of Waterville’s school system has certainly kept pace with the times.

Year: 1976