Welcome to Bidwell Lore! This week we start a 2-part series about schooling in 18th century Monterey. This article was originally written by Rob Hoogs for the Monterey Historical Society and published in the Monterey News. We are very happy to be able to reproduce it here for all of you!
One of the benefits of the Monterey Historical Society is browsing through the collection and running cross wonderful goodies. It’s like opening your stocking on Christmas Day; you never know what you’ll find but it’s going to be good! My “stocking find” this month is the following table dated 1859-60 listing the nine school districts in Monterey with details about the “scholars,” winter and summer school terms, attendance, the teachers, and their salaries.
This nugget leads to all kinds of questions: Nine Schools in Monterey? Really? Where were the schools? Who were the teachers and what were their qualifications? And what about the average monthly wages, board included?
In this article I can only begin to scratch the surface about schooling in Monterey. But here goes… Kathy Page Wasiuk wrote an excellent essay about the schools for the 1997 Monterey History book, and some of this article is taken from it. First, a brief summary of how schools were organized and run. Prior to American Independence, schooling was hit and miss: sometimes, a woman would “keep school” in her home for her children and neighbors. Rarely was a formal “schoolmaster” engaged or paid by a colonial town, and certainly not in this hinterland settlement. The proprietors of Township No. 1 started laying out the town with good intentions: they reserved Lot #20 for a school. This would have been along the main highway (now Art School Road), near the first Meeting house and first Minister’s lot.
The first schoolhouse in Tyringham (Monterey) was actually built c.1766 at what is now the corner of Beartown Mountain Road and Fairview Road, and is called the “Old Center School” (#1 in table) After Independence, the founders of the New Republic aspired to educate a “literate and informed population” – at least for males who would be enfranchised to vote. Not so much for girls. In Massachusetts, towns with more than fifty families were required to “support a regular school for a total of six months of the year. It appears this law was rarely implemented. School districts were established in the towns. “Each district had a committeeman responsible for the school property, and for hiring and paying a teacher. Standards were inconsistent from one district to another; truancy and tax collection (voluntary until 1828) [emphasis added] were constant problems.”
As a practical matter, families ran subsistence farms and every person – including young children – had to work. Many families felt they could not afford to send children to school and lose their labor, especially during spring planting, summer haying, and fall harvesting. And even when they wanted to educate their children, getting them to the school was challenging; in winter working on the farm was not as critical, but walking to school in the snow was difficult. And illnesses were also a deterrent to regular school attendance. Child labor laws enacted in 1838 required that no child under the age of 15 could work “unless he had attended school for three months.”
Despite the difficulties, table above shows that there were at least 130 students attending school in the Summer Session and a remarkable 203 in the winter term. The 1860 US Census for Monterey lists a total of 284 children in town up to age 15 (including aged 0-5 not yet in school). So a very high percentage of school-age children attended at least some school in the nine school districts.
We come to the end of part I of this series and will be back on January 20th with part II!