Schools in Furnace Village

The Historical Commission is in the midst of its second round of historic home surveys with Kathryn Grover and Neil Larson two professional researchers. Those two are responsible for the excellent survey of North Easton Village which nails down the dates and details of all the non-Richardson buildings there. The second round expands the survey south into a square bounded by Center Street, Columbus Avenue, Lincoln Street and Sheridan Street. The other part of the survey covers Furnace Village which was originally surveyed by enthusiastic amateurs (me included) back in the 1970s.

I last looked at Furnace Village when writing Easton's Neighborhoods and helping with the historical research for the Public Archaeology Labs digs at Old and New Pond back in the '90s. Those were the days when computers were useful for writing history, but the data now available online was still hidden away in archives. Now Grover-Larson can easily access censuses and other data that would have taken years to acquire just a decade ago.

Unfortunately, Easton's history always gets back to Reverend Chaffin, and his writing about Furnace Village schools has caused nothing but confusion. This is a little strange since Chaffin served on the School Committee for years. There were four schools in the Furnace Village area, three continue to stand today; but Chaffin apparently says next to nothing about one of those three standing buildings and what he does say is wrong. I knew this in the '90s and chose to write around it, not helping the situation today.

Right now Frank Meninno, Curator of the Historical Society, and I are checking the rough drafts of the surveys and between all four of us we think we have sorted out the schools of Furnace Village. No one doubts that a school existed at Four Corners from 1790 to 1869. Four Corners is the intersection of Highland Street and Route 106 where the Highland Variety Store is located. That building is long gone. In 1846 the growth of population in the area around the Foundry caused the town to create an 11th school district with its school at Harmony Hall. Here's what Chaffin has to say:

…a school for the village was held in Harmony Hall for a time. In 1869 a schoolhouse, then the largest in town, was erected, standing north of Lincoln Drake's house. March 1, 1869, districts No. 4, 5, and 11 were consolidated under the name of the Union District; and during that year the two story building now in use was built, and the scholars were graded into two schools, answering to primary and grammar grades, though for some years High School studies were taught by competent teachers, and several scholars regularly graduated from it after completing substantially the same course of study as that pursued in the Easton High School.

There's plenty to confuse out-of-towners in that paragraph. Two big schools built in the same year and an ambiguous reference to a High School being taught in one of them. Townies, at least of the South Easton variety, know that the building on the northeast corner of Highland and South Street was the one that held the High School before "they" made us go to North Easton for higher learning. How to prove that is the problem because when our researchers read this paragraph they see two schools from 1869 with no way to tell if the high school was in the primary or grammar school.

Frank Meninno solved the problem by pointing out the mistake in Chaffin. The school "standing north of Lincoln Drake's house," now 8 South Street, was erected not in 1869, but in 1855. We're now looking for the paper written by Poquanticut resident Willis Buck that would prove that point. Frank's idea is that this large building replaced Harmony Hall and when the new school was built in 1869, the old one served as a private academy for a few years before being converted in a residence which fits with Grover-Larson's research. But what about "the scholars were graded into two schools?" Luckily, we were able to pull out a copy of the 1869-70 school report that clinched the answer. When Chaffin was talking about grading, he was thinking about the days when all students attended the ungraded school at 8 South Street. An earlier school report noted that one teacher had charge of 55 students there, and under state law should have been allowed an assistant. Instead, the town relied on older students to help the teacher with the younger ones. When the new two story building was constructed it was indeed "graded" with the primary grades under the charge of one teacher on the first floor, and the grammar school and high school on the second floor with another. Two "schools" in one building beating FLO and HHR by more than a century! A few high schoolers continued to graduate from this school until free transportation was provided to North Easton shortly after Chaffin finished his history in 1886. As Grover-Larson reminded us John Gay, Jr. and perhaps his father ran an omnibus service from the Furnace that took students to the depot at Easton Center where they could hop on the train for North Easton.