CHAPTER IX SCHOOLS.
THE condition of Pittsfield’s public schools in 1876, and the curious discord concerning them into which the community had allowed itself to drift, can be understood only by recalling some of the town’s previous experience in the support and management of free education.
It is necessary in the first place to remember that for many years the public school system in Pittsfield had been shot through and through by village politics. This was the case in many New England towns; Pittsfield’s case was peculiarly aggravated. As early as 1781, the school question was turned into a battlefield for political partisans. The newly constituted state government required every town of the size of Pittsfield to maintain a grammar school on penalty of indictment and fine. Pittsfield’s impoverished town government in 1781 was Whig, and it failed to comply with the grammar school law for the perfectly good reason of lack of funds. The excuse was one which the state authorities in those days of almost universal financial distress might readily have accepted; but nevertheless the Tory politicians of the village promptly tried to discredit the local Whig administration by pressing the grand jury to indict the town for non-compliance, and they inserted an article in the town meeting warrant of 1781 “to see if the town will raise money to set up a grammar school to save the town from fine”, A hot and protracted political fight ensued, in which the voters wholly lost sight of the educational interests involved. The Whig majority opposed a grammar school long after it was financially possible, and merely because it was advocated by their Tory assailants.
Thus at an early period the school question, according to a modern phrase, “got into politics”, whence it was not destined soon to emerge. Pittsfield was an isolated village, where political
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feuds were bitter and inheritable almost beyond belief. The ancient grammar school quarrel outlived both the old Whig and Tory parties; it injured the cause of public education for at least half a century; and it was revived, with much of its original
acrimony, by the local agitation in 1849 which resulted in the erection of the first high school building.
It should be borne in mind, too, that the New England district system of maintenance and control of the common schools had been exceedingly popular in Pittsfield and most agreeable to the political temperament of its people. Although, in 1850, an act of the General Court had enabled any town to abolish its school districts and to take possession of their property under certain prescribed rules, Pittsfield steadfastly declined to do so. Not until compelled by the state legislature in 1869, did the town relinquish the system, and then with regretful disapproval which affected the popular mind for several years thereafter. In 1871, the legislature passed a law permitting towns in which the school district system had been abolished by the act of 1869 to reinstate that system by a two- thirds vote; and the Pittsfield town meeting of that year favored reinstatement by a vote of
61 to 37 — only slightly less than the requisite majority. The abandonment of independent school districts had seemed to many citizens like parting with an essential prerogative of selfgovernment, and in 1876 they were still in a hostile mood toward the town system of schools by which the old system had been superseded.
Their attitude was not unnatural. Pittsfield had thirteen school districts in 1869, and several of them were as rich and populous as an ordinary Berkshire village. It has been plausibly maintained, indeed, that in Massachusetts, until the middle of the last century, the school district, and not the town, was the real political unit of the Commonwealth. In school district meetings, many men had learned their first lessons in the transaction of public business and had made their first voyage on the cross seas of public debate. The districts were, in one sense, miniature republics, sovereign states, and they could not be wiped out of existence without provoking among their citizens a fondness for criticizing adversely, and perhaps unjustly, the
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results under the central authority, which had displaced them.
Moreover, the conduct of school affairs, for a few years after 1869, was not so manifestly efficient and harmonious as to enlist friends for the new regime, although it was upheld by such earnest committeemen as Charles B. Redfield and William R. Plunkett. At the annual town meeting of 1868, the town instructed its school committee of nine members to employ, for the first time, a superintendent of schools, and the committee accordingly engaged Lebbeus Scott. Mr. Scott was a conscientious official, but had he been Horace Mann himself, it is not likely that his efforts would have been hospitably acclaimed by the unawed electorates of the thirteen school districts, accustomed to superintend their own concerns. The town, at the annual meeting of 1869 and in spite of a forcible appeal by James D. Colt, refused to make an appropriation for the salary of a superintendent; and the school committee of that year was compelled to put into operation the new system of schools without the aid of anybody who could devote his entire time and energy to the task.
In 1871, however, the town instructed the committee to employ one of its members as a superintendent, and Dr. John M. Brewster was selected. His period of service, which continued for five years, was for him one of stress and storm. Dr. Brewster, in office, was an idealist, who appreciated fully the importance of his position. He was not a pacificator, capable of smoothing the road for an unpopular innovation. After he had been super-
intendent for a year, the town meeting refused to make provision for his salary. Mr. Redfield and Mr. Plunkett promptly declared that they would, in that case, withdraw from the school committee; and the meeting as promptly reconsidered and reversed its vote. Dr. Brewster’s salary by a vote of the town in 1873 was fixed at $2,000. The next year it was cut in half. The committee again stood by him, and in 1875 found a way to increase his compensation to $1,500; whereupon the town, at the annual town meeting of 1876, declined again to appropriate money for the employment of any superintendent. Dr. Brewster celebrated his retirement to private life by telling his adversaries, in a caustic letter, exactly what he thought of them. “I believe,” he wrote, “that the majority of our citizens earnestly desire that
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their public schools shall not continue to be made, upon the annual recurrence of town meeting, mere toys and playthings in the hands of educational sceptics and ultra-economists.”
A share of Dr. Brewster’s troubles was probably due to the fact that upon him devolved much of the thankless business of grading the former district schools. Before 1869, all of the common schools in District No. 1, which included the central portion of the main village, had been graded, with a single exception; but elsewhere the ungraded system ruled. That system was highly convenient, because scholars of all ages might always,
under it, attend the school nearest home. Educationally, it was wasteful of time and effort. But it was an inherent part of the school district plan; as such it was long and jealously cherished by public regard in Pittsfield; and the reformer who attempted to eradicate it could not hope for popularity. Nevertheless, a comprehensive scheme of gradation was initiated in 1874, and two years later only one-seventh of the pupils attended ungraded
schools.
Thus the town’s committee to which was entrusted the management of public education in 1876 faced a difficult problem. A long series of wrangles over school affairs had made public opinion of them irritable. That antagonism to progressive educational methods, which must be expected anywhere, had been in Pittsfield exaggerated. Not only had the town, somewhat angrily, denied to the committee a professional superintendent, but
also it had reduced the total appropriation for the maintenance of schools to $24,600, a sum less by $6,400 than that voted in the previous year. The sudden retrenchment cannot be ascribed solely to hard times.
A record of the school year ending in 1876 shows that there were then in the high school 65 pupils and three teachers; in the four grammar schools, 333 pupils and twelve teachers; in the eleven intermediate schools, 533 pupils and fourteen teachers; in the fourteen primary schools, 881 pupils and fifteen teachers; and in the eleven ungraded schools, 314 pupils. The number of teachers in the ungraded schools is not stated. Presumably it was eleven, which would make the aggregate number of teachers fifty-five. The membership of pupils in the forty-one schools
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was 2,126, There were twenty-five schoolhouses owned by the town.
Nothing can be more obvious than that a close and daily supervision was essential in order to obtain even passable efficiency from a system of this size. Except in high schools and
less frequently in grammar schools, the business of a teacher in public schools had hardly attained the dignity of a permanent profession. There had been many faithful and competent teachers in the district schools, but stability of personnel and of method had been lacking. The report of the school committee of Pittsfield in 1839 noted as an unusual fact that the same teacher had officiated in one of the district schools for so many as
three successive terms. Although nominally unified, the public schools of Pittsfield in 1876 still needed the coherence imparted by a fixed and harmonious control, and, lacking the advantage of it then, the whole cause of free education might have suffered greatly for several years, because of the peculiarly sensitive state of the popular mind.
By good fortune, a controlling hand was found of the right sort. The chairman of the school committee of 1876 was William B. Rice. As chairman also of the executive sub-committee, Mr. Rice assumed in effect all of the duties of a superintendent of schools, and he performed them with discretion and diligence. In 1877, the town gave the committee authority to employ a superintendent at a salary of $800, but the place could not be
filled at that figure, and Mr. Rice continued to act as superintendent. In 1879 he accepted the office formally, and held it until 1885, when he was succeeded therein by Thomas H. Day, a member of the school committee.
It would be difficult to overrate the value of Mr. Rice’s connection with the public schools of Pittsfield at this critical stage of their development. He was a practical man, whom the people already knew well, and he was far removed from the type of reforming faddist, so abhorred by the hard-headed voters of a town meeting. Nevertheless, his realization was complete of the need of school reform, of progress, and of advanced methods of instruction; and that Pittsfield might obtain them he kept hammering away with a pertinacity which seemed to defy discourage-
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ment. Sentences from his report of 1878 indicate the liberal breadth of his ideas of public education. “To assign lessons and hear recitations is barely to touch the outside of the true sphere of the teacher’s work It seems to me that many, in discussing the public school question, almost entirely lose sight of the great question, why public schools should exist at all. . . To look upon the public schools as designed merely to fit children to get on in life, is to underestimate the immensely important interests which the public has in their maintenance.”
Retaining always his keen, benignant, and salutary regard for free education, William B. Rice served Pittsfield as a school committeeman from 1872 to 1884 and from 1891 to 1911. The public schools of town and city have never had a more devoted and helpful friend.
The superintendency of Mr. Rice over the town’s school affairs marked the beginning of a beneficial change, not only in the internal workings of the system, but also in the willingness with which the voters supported it. He recommended a liberal compliance with the statute concerning the provision of the free textbooks in 1878, and the town meeting of 1879 authorized the committee so to issue them. The annual appropriations for the maintenance of the schools were slowly but steadily increased. It was not so easy, however, to obtain appropriations for new schoolhouses.
The crusade which broke down much of the public apathy concerning the town’s schoolhouses was led by James W. Hull, who was chairman of the school committee from 1877 to 1882, and it was strongly promoted by his associates. Their attack upon this indifference at the town meeting of 1878 was resolute and brisk. Several schoolhouses were overcrowded, and, from a sanitary point of view, almost medieval. The town meeting
serenely declined to take action. In the following autumn, the work of the Orchard Street school was interrupted by a dangerous epidemic of disease which was clearly attributable to conditions in the building. The committee’s indignant reference to the building in its report of 1879 made a brief excursion into the ironical. “Towns and committees” it declared, “have no power to set aside natural law.” The town meeting of the same year,
136 HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
whether stung by this shaft or not, voted money for a new schoolhouse on Orchard Street. The committee in charge provided a brick structure of a single story and four rooms, which, with additions made in 1895, still serves the city. The erection of this building and in 1876 that of the high school building on South Street, which was destroyed by fire in 1895, signalized the commencement of a new era of schoolhouse design and construc-
tion; and until 1884 these were the only school edifices of brick in the city.
The main difficulties in providing new schoolhouses were those of the determination and of the expense of proper sites for them. The numerous small school lots inherited from the district system had been purchased in the days when apparently any land was good enough for a schoolhouse, if within a convenient radius of it there were forty or fifty school children of all ages. In the meantime, the value of land had been multiplied in the
thickly settled parts of the town where existed the greatest need of modern schoolhouses; and the consolidation of schools, desirable both from an educational and an economic standpoint, was hindered by the lack of foresight of a previous generation of voters.
The school committee in 1880 began to urge the dedication of the present Common to school purposes, and this project was recommended also to the town by a special committee appointed in 1881 to consider the matter of sites; but the measure was not
approved, although the voters were now appreciative of the necessity. The school population was increasing at a rate which would fill three or four additional rooms a year, and singular expedients were employed, as when the congestion in the Silver Lake school was relieved by removing a number of its pupils to a room in a block on Fenn Street, under the same roof with such academic inspirations as a billiard saloon and a roller skating
rink.
The town was no longer disposed to view the situation with complacency. In 1883, a new schoolhouse was authorized at Pontoosuc and another at the corner of Fenn and Second Streets. The former was ready for occupancy in 1884, and the latter in 1885. New schoolhouses at the Junction and on Linden Street
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were built in 1888 and 1889, and one on Winter Street at Morningside in 1890. These buildings were adequate and creditable; and while it cannot be said that, at the time when the town in 1891 became a city, the equipment of schoolhouses was what the public deserved to have, it is true that the voters at town meetings after 1880 had displayed a spirit distinctly more earnest than that of their predecessors in supporting public education. The town’s last annual appropriation for the maintenance of schools was $48,000.
Upon Mr. Hull’s retirement from the office of chairman of the town’s school committee in 1882, he was succeeded by Dr. Abner M. Smith, who served until 1885. Dr. Smith was followed, for a period of three years, by Dr. William M. Mercer. In 1888, Col. Walter Cutting was chairman, and, in 1889, Harlan H. Ballard, who served until the expiration of the town government. Thomas H. Day was superintendent of schools, following Mr. Rice, from 1886 to 1891. The importance to the town of the duties undertaken by these men and their associates on the school committees is indicated by the facts that, between 1882 and 1891, the school enrolment increased from 2,783 to 3,422, the number of schools from forty-three to sixty-three, and the number of teachers from sixty-two to eighty-six. They instituted a training school for teachers, revived evening schools, which had been abandoned in 1876, and broadened the field of usefulness of the common schools by encouraging instruction in mechanical and free-hand drawing, vocal music, and natural science. Nor should it be forgotten, in recording their efforts to establish a right and liberal policy, that Pittsfield’s latterly overgrown and overhurried town meetings did not always allow a forum adapted to the discussion of educational theory and practice. Nevertheless, on penalty of decreased appropriations, it was necessary for the school committeemen and their allies, in open meeting, to defend progressive methods of instruction and school organization against all comers, to satisfy the scruples of honest voters whose ideas of the scope of public education had been formed in
the rural district schools of their boyhood, and even sometimes to placate then and there an oratorical father whose children had a grievance against a teacher or a textbook.
1S8 HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
The city’s first school committee, in 1891, had for its chairman Joseph Tucker, who held the oJ9Bce until 1896. William B. Rice was the chairman in 1896, 1897 and 1898. In 1899,
Judge Tucker resumed the chairmanship of the committee, and therein served continuously for six years. He was succeeded in 1905 by William L. Adam, who was chairman until 1914. In 1914 and 1915, Joseph E. Peirson was the official head of the
school committee, which, under the municipal charter, consisted of fourteen members, two being elected by each ward of the city. Beginning in 1891 and continuing through 1915, William Nugent was a member of the committee, and its secretary.
The committee of 1891 soon lost by resignation the services as superintendent of Mr. Day, and A. M. Edwards was engaged to replace him. Among the salaried superintendents of Pittsfield schools, Mr. Edwards was the first who brought to the office any previous technical training in his professional duties, and who had not been a member of the committee which employed him. He served for three years. In 1894, Dr. Eugene Bouton accepted the position and held it until 1905, when he was succeeded by Charles A. Byram. Mr. Byram’s tenure of the office ceased in 1909; Clarence J. Russell performed the duties of “acting superintendent” from September 1909, to June 1910; and upon the latter date Clair G. Persons, who still holds the position, became superintendent.
Many new features characterized the progress of the public schools of Massachusetts after 1890. Some of them were the enrichment of courses of study without loss of thoroughness, a greater respect for the pupil’s individuality, an extraordinary development of the high school system, an increased demand for trained skill and earnestness in supervision and in teachers of all grades, and a remarkable advance in schoolhouse construction, sanitation, and equipment. Along these lines, the schools of
Pittsfield moved forward; but, somewhat as the schools of the town had been often handicapped by the indifference of the voters at town meeting, so now the schools of the city were to be burdened by the unavoidable difficulties due to an abnormally
rapid gain of population. The number of children of school age was, in 1890, 3,276; in 1915 it was 7,463.
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These diflaculties were clearly apprehended by the mayor of 1894, John C. Crosby, whose inaugural address advocated a new high school in a central location and laid emphasis on the general need of new schoolhouses. A new schoolhouse had been occupied at Stearnsville in 1893, but the buildings in the center of the city had become inadequate. In March, 1895, the burning of the high school building on South Street complicated the problem. Judge Crosby, who was mayor again in 1895, again pressed forcibly the necessity of new schoolhouses; the school committee appeared before the city council and explained the physical plight of the schools; and in May money was appropriated for three new buildings, with an aggregate capacity of twenty-two rooms and at an aggregate cost of over $100,000. The emergency, when at last appreciated, was squarely met.
With the erection of these buildings was established in Pittsfield the excellent custom of bestowing upon the more important schoolhouses the names of distinguished citizens. Of the schoolhouses authorized in 1895, the Solomon L. Russell School was built on Peck’s Road, the Charles B. Redfield School on Elizabeth Street, and the George N. Briggs School at the corner of West and John Streets. The Russell School and the Redfield School
were opened in the fall of 1896. The Briggs School, owing to vexatious delay in construction, was not ready until a year later.
Having authorized this liberal expenditure, however, the city council of 1895 still faced the imperative need of a new building for the high school, and plans for it were at once initiated on a similar generous scale of appropriation. The original cost to the city of the high school building between Second Street and the Common, opened in the spring of 1898, was $170,000. The cost to the town of its immediate predecessor on South Street had
been $16,000 in 1876.
Thus in 1895 the city was compelled to shoulder in one year financial burdens, for educational purposes, of which a large share might have been distributed over several previous years; and the troublesome experience was not repeated, although the
necessity for new schoolhouses and for the enlargement of existing buildings soon began again to be pressing. In 1905, a spacious and handsome new building, to be known as the William
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M. Mercer School, was dedicated at the corner of First and Orchard Streets. In 1908, the Henry L. Dawes School on Elm Street was opened; and the William R. Plunkett School in 1909 was built at the corner of First and Fenn Streets, of which the cost was $80,000. In 1910, the William Nugent School was opened at the Junction, having been erected to replace there the schoolhouse destroyed by fire in April, 1909. On Onota Street, the William Francis Bartlett School was ready for occupancy in 1912. The Crane School in 1913 was opened at Morningside, on Dartmouth Street; and the Pomeroy School, on West Housatonic Street, was completed in 1915.
The Winter Street building, erected in 1890, was by the school committee in 1899 officially named the William B. Rice School; in 1907 the name of the Joseph Tucker School was given to the schoolhouse on Linden Street, of which the capacity had been greatly increased since its construction in 1889; and also in 1907 the building which had been erected in 1885 at Fenn and Second Streets received the title of the Franklin F. Read School.
The town meeting voters in 1876 could not regard the Pittsfield high school with complete friendliness. There the annual cost of instruction alone was then more than $40 for each pupil, and the educational function of the school was not very clearly appreciated. Probably most of those who finished its course did so with the intention of becoming teachers. In 1875, and again in 1878, the small graduating class was composed entirely of
girls. A few boys were able there to prepare themselves for college, but the vast majority of Pittsfield’s public school pupils never saw, and never purposed to see, the inside of a high school. To many voters this school seemed, therefore, like a useless and
expensive superfluity, and, had not its continuance been prescribed by statute, a motion to abolish it between 1870 and 1880 must have found support.
In 1880 the regular course was one of four years, and during the school year ending in 1884 the average daily attendance exceeded one hundred for the first time. An increase of attendance after this was constantly maintained. The institution began to be recognized as an essential and important part of the public school system. Gradually the curriculum was made more
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elastic. In 1888, the pupil had a choice of four courses of study. These were a classical course, preparatory for college; a scientific course, differing from the classical mainly in the substitution of the sciences for Greek; an English course, differing from the scientific in allowing the pupil a choice between Latin, French, or German in the first and second years, and in the substitution of English for a foreign language in the third and fourth years; and lastly a business course, designed for those who could not remain in the school to complete one of the four-year courses. The average daily attendance first touched two hundred in 1894.
In the following year, however, the educational and numerical development of the school was rudely checked by the destruction by fire of the South Street building. The disaster was so complete that the only salvage of school equipment was a piano, a chair, and a teacher’s desk. Under these circumstances, commendable energy was displayed by the committee and by the faculty of the school. A floor was hired and furnished in the block, then unfinished, on the west corner of Clapp Avenue and West Street; and there the school resumed its sessions in less than a month after the fire. These makeshift quarters were occupied for two school years, and in the fall of 1897 the larger part of the high school was housed in the building on School Street, thus returning temporarily to its old home after an interval of a quarter-century.
During this migratory period, the work of the institution was, of course, conducted with great difficulty. Laboratory instruction was almost impossible. That the school was able to preserve a considerable measure of usefulness and a commendable measure of morale is to the credit both of the teachers and the scholars.
Their trials were aggravated by many unforeseen delays in the erection of the new building on Second Street. Retarded by the necessity of righting defective workmanship, the progress of construction was slow, and the building was not available for occupancy until 1898. It was a spacious and conveniently arranged edifice of light brick, trimmed with marble and terra cotta, and in dimensions 135 feet by 137. Its three floors might accommodate 600 pupils, with the recitation rooms, laboratories.
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and accessories demanded by modern requirements for high school work. An auditorium on the second floor seated 700 people. The first graduation exercises therein were conducted on June twenty-third, 1898, when forty-four students received
diplomas. In previous years, the exercises had been held usually at the Academy of Music.
At first, the new building was able to accommodate schools of a lower grade as well as those of the high school, but so extraordinarily rapid was the latter’s growth that it soon monopolized and overflowed its quarters. In 1899 the enrolment of the high school was 247; in 1909 it was 455; in the fall term of 1911 it was 705. In 1912, the commercial section was transferred to the Read School on Fenn Street. In the winter term of 1914, the enrolment of the high school was 945, its actual membership was 891, its faculty numbered thirty-six, and the relief afforded by utilizing the Read building had, in the words of the principal’s report, “ceased to exist”. This remarkable expansion of the
high school in recent years was accompanied, if not accelerated, by several noteworthy changes of method and organization. The so-called business course was greatly strengthened, departmental subdivisions were more effectively arranged, a scheme of
semi-annual promotions was introduced, and a rational effort was made to develop that elusive quality known as school spirit in both students and instructors.
In 1876 the principal was Albert Tolman, who was succeeded by Earl G. Baldwin in 1878, by Edward H. Rice in 1881, by John B. Welch in 1887, by Charles A. Byram in 1891, and by
William D. Goodwin in 1904. Harry E. Pratt, the present principal, followed Mr. Goodwin in 1911.
Later advances achieved by the city’s general system of public schools were most conspicuous, perhaps, in 1911, a year which marked the introduction of a more flexible gradation and of the physical examination of school children. At the same time, instruction in the manual arts was somewhat forwarded; but this department of public education was peculiarly discouraged by lack of adequate means and facilities, although a one-year’s course of manual training for boys was established in 1909, and for girls a course of domestic science in 1913.
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The work of the evening schools, accentuated in value by the increasing number of foreign-born laborers desirous of learning to read and write English, was continued so successfully that in 1913 the maximum attendance therein was 660.
A training school for teachers, which was initiated apparently in 1880, was in 1905 discontinued. More than one-half of the teaching force of the public schools of Pittsfield had been graduated from it, under the instruction, after 1888, of Miss Arabella Roach, at the Orchard Street building, and it had served well the purpose for which it was intended. The school committee of 1905, however, was of the opinion that the convenient eJQBciencies of the State Normal Schools made its continuance of questionable value.
With far less unanimity of opinion did committee after committee regard the question of kindergarten instruction. It was seriously suggested first by the committee of 1893; an oflBcial appropriation was not made until 1902 for a kindergarten; and then the Pittsfield Kindergarten Association, which had maintained a school at Russell’s, turned over to the city its equipment. The work of this organization and, indeed, its assumption and enlargement by the city are to be ascribed chiefly to the enthusiasm in the cause of public kindergartens of Mrs. William L. Adam, who continued to devote herself to their interests for several years after they had become a part of the municipal system of schools.
The number of teachers which the system employed in 1891, the first year of the city form of government, was eighty-six. In 1915 the number of teachers was 203. The appropriations voted by the first city council for the maintenance of schools in 1891 amounted to $54,000. The city’s appropriation for school purposes in 1915 was $252,000.
An important share of the duty of providing free education for the youth of Pittsfield was assumed in 1897 by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who opened a free academy at the convent on North Street in September of that year. Two years later, in 1899, the building of the St. Joseph’s Parochial School was erected on First Street, containing ten classrooms, and an assembly hall. Beginning its sessions there in September, 1899, the school had an
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enrolment during its first year of approximately 470 pupils, and its work has been of increasing value and usefulness to the community. The enrolment for the school year 1914-1915 included 688 pupils, arranged in nine grades and a high school, where the
course was one of four years’ instruction. In effect, the courses of study have conformed to those afforded by the public schools maintained by the city. The principals and teachers have been the Sisters of St. Joseph; and the successive principals have been Sister M. Irene (1899), Sister Clara Agnes (1900), Sister St. Thomas (1905), Sister M. Irene (1911), and Sister M. Raphael (1914).
In 1876 the famous private school for girls at Maplewood, having been known for twenty years as Maplewood Institute, was slowly expiring, although the courageous and somewhat pathetic struggle to keep it alive was not abandoned until 1884, when a school met for the last time within the walls which had sheltered an academical institution since 1827. Rev. Charles V. Spear had become its sole owner in 1864 by purchasing the land and buildings for $27,000. The scholars, many of whom came from distant parts of the country, then numbered 200, and both in popularity and educational value the Institute was the equal of any girls’ school in New England. Immediately, however, the shadow of evil fortune began to enshroud it. Two invasions of its buildings by epidemic disease, in 1864 and 1866, weakened public confidence. Having partly regained its prestige, the school with 150 pupils in 1873 was so staggered by the financial panic of that year that thereafter its decadence was never again checked, and competition with its rivals at Poughkeepsie and Northampton was out of the question. In 1883, Mr. Spear, who seems gallantly to have expended his mental and physical energy in the losing fight, leased the institution to Louis C. Stanton, a member of his teaching staff. Mr. Stanton’s endeavor was soon concluded. The property then was presented by Mr. Spear to Oberlin College in Ohio, with the hope, perhaps, that the college might be able to revive the fame and prosperity of the Institute. This the collegiate authorities were unwilling to attempt. In 1887 they leased the establishment to Arthur W. Plumb, who transformed it into a summer hotel. For a
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similar purpose it had been utilized by evanescent tenants for several previous seasons. Mr. Plumb purchased the land and buildings in 1889.
The Maplewood Association, composed of alumnae of the Institute and organized in New York City in 1900, cherishes warmly the memories and spirit of the school. It held its first
annual reunion at the present Maplewood on June seventh, 1900. Rev, Charles V. Spear died, May tenth, 1891, at Constantinople. He was born in the town of Randolph, now Holbrook, Massachusetts, November thirteenth, 1825, and was graduated in 1846 from Amherst College. Soon after graduation he came to Pittsfield to teach at the Institute, then conducted by Rev. Wellington Hart Tyler, and to study theology under Rev. John Todd. He was licensed to preach in 1851, and for three years was in charge of a church at Sudbury, Massachusetts, but he resumed his connection with the school at Maplewood at about
the time when Rev. J. Holmes Agnew became its proprietor, in 1854. Mr. Spear was for thirty years a helpful citizen of Pittsfield, and served the community as president of the Library Association and as a trustee of its successor, the Berkshire Athenaeum. He was a cultured man, of high and pure ideals. In his later years, he fell heir to a large estate and was a generous benefactor of Oberlin College, to which he gave a library and a supporting endowment; of the latter, the Maplewood property was a part.
The Institute was reanimated in 1867 by the advent of Benjamin C. Blodgett as head of the department of music; indeed, that department was judged to be the chief attraction of the
school. Mr. Blodgett, however, seceded in 1878, and established a music school of his own on Wendell Avenue, in the house built by Gen. William Francis Bartlett. By his work there, as well as at Maplewood, Mr. Blodgett, stimulated in the town of his time a fondness for good music, of which the influence may be said still to linger. In 1881, he left Pittsfield to accept the duties of professor of music at Smith College. For some years, however, after he had ceased to be a resident of Pittsfield he was able to give to the pupils of Miss Salisbury’s school on South Street the benefit of his talent for musical instruction and criticism.
146 HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
Miss Mary E. Salisbury, of Providence, Rhode Island, acquired in 1871 the ownership of the private school for girls which had been conducted in Pittsfield since 1845 by Miss Clara Wells. When its management was assumed by Miss Salisbury, who had been Miss Wells’s assistant, the school was housed in the brick building at the north corner of Reed and South Streets, which had sheltered a boys’ boarding school from 1826 to 1852. Under
Miss Salisbury’s eflBcient, gracious, and affectionate direction, her school for girls prospered notably. In 1875 the building was en- larged, but it was not long before admission was sought annually by more scholars than could be accommodated. Nevertheless, Miss Salisbury, a firm believer in the personal element in education, quietly declined to allow the school to outgrow the sphere of her intimate supervision. A department of day scholars, which included young boys, was liberally patronized, and thus
Miss Salisbury came to be endeared to many Pittsfield households. In 1898, honored and beloved, she resigned her work, in which she had labored with rare singleness of purpose for more than twenty-five years.
Miss Salisbury’s successor in the South Street building was Miss Mira H. Hall, who there opened her day and boarding school for girls in September, 1898. In 1889, an additional
house was rented on Reed Street; in 1900, the school was moved to Elmwood, the former home of Edward Learned. Miss Hall, nine years afterward, purchased from the heirs of Col. Walter Cutting the house and residential property once occupied by Col. Cutting on Holmes Road, and there reopened her school in the fall of 1909. The pupils of her successful boarding school numbered seventy -five in 1915.
Of private schools for boys, Pittsfield was not fertile during the period surveyed by this volume. At Wendell Hall, Earl G. Baldwin for two years conducted a boys’ school which was opened in 1881. In 1883, Rev. Joseph M. Turner established the St. Stephen’s School for boys on Pomeroy Avenue, which after his death in 1887 was continued for a short time by Edward T. Fisher. From 1888 to 1893, Joseph E. Peirson was the proprietor and principal of a boys’ school on West Housatonic Street. Arthur J. Clough, in 1895, opened the Berkshire School
SCHOOLS 147
for boys. This was maintained until 1903. At first it occupied the former Theodore Pomeroy homestead on West Housatonic Street; in 1901, Mr. Clough moved his school to the building on South Street, recently occupied by the schools of Miss Hall and Miss Salisbury.
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