- This article was taken from our April 2008 Town of Skaneateles Newsletter and was written by Beth Batlle, Town Historian
At one time there were twenty or more rural schools in the Town of Skaneateles. Some of them were given strange names such as : Poverty Corners, Hen Coop, and Peach Blow. There also were several schools just across the town line that also served the students of Skaneateles, including Clintonville, Hart Lot, County Line, and Chamberlain Schools.
The first rural school was built of logs, in 1798, by General Robert Earll, in Willow Glen on the west side of the creek. Edith Whitman, the first teacher in the town, taught at this school. Also, in 1818, Lydia Mott established a private school for girls, known as the Friends Female Boarding School, or “The Hive”, on West Lake Road on the site of the former Wellington house. This school served 40 or more students, while most of the other Skaneateles rural schools served an average of 12 to 15 students.
If you could go back in time and visit the Shamrock School in the winter, as you entered the door and sniffed the air, you would smell potatoes baking. When the students arrived at the white, wood-frame schoolhouse in the morning, they placed the potatoes they had brought from home in the wood or coal-burning stove that heated the one-room building. By noon time the potatoes would be perfectly baked in time for lunch.
Or, if you then visited the West Hill School on Old Seneca Turnpike, you might have arrived in time to hear 12 to 15 corks popping off in all directions from underneath a similar stove. When the students had arrived that morning, they found the ink in their ink wells in their desks had frozen over night. The teacher, having started the fire in the stove when she arrived earlier, now instructed her pupils to place the ink wells beneath the stove to thaw. However, she became busy teaching the students from grade 1 to 8, as all teachers did, and forgot all about them until the popping noises interrupted her lessons.
If your last stop was the Shepard Settlement School, on Stump Road, you might see the teacher being pulled by her students on a sled across the snow and ice to the girls’ outhouse in back of the building. Being a large woman, she needed to use the facility and was afraid of falling on the extremely treacherous ground. So, much to her relief, the students came to her rescue.
With the advent of chemical toilets, these facilities were moved inside most of the school houses. And students from these schools used a common dipper to drink the water, drawn from a neighbor’s well in a bucket, unless the school was lucky enough to have its own well. This practice was stopped in 1918 (the year of the influenza epidemic) by the State Health Department and individual cups were required.
After the 8th grade, students came in to the village to attend high school. Girls often hired on to do house work for families in the village so they would be near the school. Many of the boys walked great distance, morning and night, in all kinds of weather, to get to the high school.
This changed in 1931 when Herbert Splane and Russell Lader started a bus route on East Lake Road, serving high school students in the Shamrock, Coon Hill and Spafford District #7 schools. The bus, a deluxe model with the capacity of 35 passengers, would pick up the students along the route in front of their house, while outlying students walked to their rural school to be picked up there. Splane & Lader also supplied a bus for the West Lake Road students. After the company went bankrupt in 1933, this route was taken over by George Bentley and George Tallcott.
In 1950, when the Skaneateles Central School system was formed, residents of the rural schools, wanting the best education available for their children, met and voted to become a part of this system. (Although many students found the transition difficult, nevertheless, one by one, all the rural schools shut their doors.) At such a meeting in Mandana, District Principal Fred Fundus said as he watched the departing figures from the doorway, “When the meeting closed and the people went home, I felt that part of what had made America great was gone.”
If you, or someone you know, attended a rural school in Skaneateles, and would like to share your experiences or photos, please contact Beth Batlle at 685-3296, or Bill Pavlus at 685-5515. We especialy need material on the Shotwell and Thorne Schools, and District #13 in the southwest part of the Town.
http://skaneateleshistoricalsociety.org/
