Peter Parley Schoolhouse

The Schoolhouse in the 1700s

When the West Lane School was built in 1756, the town had been settled for nearly half a century. Education was always important to the town, beginning with its first minister, Thomas Hawley, who taught young scholars in the meeting house on the Village Green. By 1760 there were six district schools, supported by the residents of those parts of the town. Schoolhouses in New England were often constructed on the islands made by crossroads. In the case of the West Lane School at least, the land was also very rocky and unsuitable for any farming use. The initial building and maintenance of the schoolhouse were a community affair. Parents would lend a hand with their carpentry skills. Families would also supply firewood, for a fireplace at first and later for a woodstove.

Fortunately, there is an excellent account of what the schoolhouse was like at the turn of the 19th century. Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the writer of the Peter Parley stories, attended the school from 1799 to 1803. Although he remembers the school with fondness, he was appalled that children were taught using adult books or scary nursery rhymes. After completing his studies, he went on to rectify the situation, becoming one of the most famous children’s book authors of his time.

He later wrote an extensive account of what it was like attending the school and living in Ridgefield in his book Recollections of a Lifetime, Volume 1. The original building “consisted of rough, unpainted clapboards, upon a wooden frame. It was plastered within, and contained two apartments – a little entry, taken out of a corner for a wardrobe and the school-room proper. The chimney was of stone, and pointed with mortar, which, by the way, had been dug into a honeycomb by uneasy and enterprising penknives. The fireplace was six feet wide and four feet deep. The flute was so ample and so perpendicular that the rain sleet and snow fell direct to the hearth.” Describing the interior he notes, “we were all seated upon benches, made of what were called slabs – that is, boards having the exterior or rounded part of the log on one side: as they were useless for other purposes, these were converted into school-benches, the rounded part down. They had each four supports, consisting of straddling wooden legs, set into augur-holes. Our own legs swayed in the air, for they were too short to touch the floor. Oh, what an awe fell over me, when we were all seated and silence reigned around!”

Goodrich describes the exterior landscape as follows: “The ground hereabouts – as everywhere else in Ridgefield – was exceedingly stony, and in making the pathway the stones had been thrown out right and left, and these remained in heaps on either side, from generation to generation.” He recalls a nearby chestnut tree that the boys used to throw sticks and stones at to knock off the chestnuts.

Ridgefield was a farming community and they adjusted their schooling accordingly. Initially, there was a women’s school in the summer months attended by young children. The older children were needed on the farms. In the winter a male teacher was hired to teach the boys and girls in the neighborhood up to the age of eighteen or even twenty. Goodrich says as many as forty scholars could be crowded into this little building!

What about eating & recess?

Scholars had one hour off from 12:00 to 1:00 to eat and play. This hour was called “nooning.” Students would bring their “dinners” outside and play for most of the hour anywhere they wished, as log as they could hear the school bell at 1:00 calling them back to classes.

Scholars brought their “dinners” from home in “berry pails” or baskets. Their mothers may have packed hard boiled eggs, apples, pears, bread with meat or lard, corn bread, cheese or sausages. In the winter they might bring raw potatoes that the teacher would put in a big iron bucket on the hot stove. By lunch time they would be hot baked potatoes. Students carved their initials into their potato to identify it.

The students’ only drink would be water from a bucket that the bigger boys filled. They all drank from the same tin cup or dipper! A second bucket of water would be kept in the room for washing hands.

During the early 1800s the old building was replaced with the current larger building. In the 1830s, before the Civil War, the blackboards were installed. In 1893 it was estimated that the yearly cost of a student was $8.01. (In 2010 the estimated cost per student was $7,830.) The current interior of the building is similar to the way it looked in 1895 with its black pot belly stove and iron and wooden desks.

In the early 1900s the schoolhouse sustained minor damage when one of those new inventions, the Model T car, failed to make the corner turn and crashed into it. A member of the prominent Pinchbeck family, John Pinchbeck, Sr, attended the school in the early 1900s. His writing book still lies in the classroom. In the 1970s a marble bench was installed outside the building and dedicated to his son for all the service he had done for Ridgefield as Tree Warden.

In 1915 the school bell stopped ringing and the flag was taken down. The schoolhouse closed its doors. Several schoolhouses were consolidated and students started attending the new Benjamin Franklin Grammar school on East Ridge. It remained a grammar school until 1927 when it became Ridgefield High School. Today it is the Richard E. Venus Municipal Building, often referred to by locals as the “old High School”.

The town of Ridgefield owns the little red schoolhouse and its grounds. For many years the Ridgefield Garden Club leased the site from the town. In February 2012 the Ridgefield Historical Society took over the lease.