OCTOBER THOUGHTS

This month, on Halloween, scores of Burlington children will be in school, but they won’t be doing math or science or reading.

They will be learning a little bit of history, though, as they visit the Old West School, this town’s last remaining one-room schoolhouse.

The annual evening event, hosted by the Burlington Historical Commission and the Burlington Historical Society, not only gives children and their families a safe place to trick or treat, but it also gives them a taste of school days more than 200 years ago.

So what was school like back then?

First a little general background. In 1642, the Massachusetts General Court enacted a law making education compulsory; every child had to be able to “read perfectly the English tongue (and) have knowledge of the laws.” Five years later, the general court enacted a law requiring towns of 50 families or more to establish elementary schools; if they did not, they would be assessed a fine.

According to our town’s late historian, John E. Fogelberg, there is no record of a school in Woburn until 1673, when two women taught in their own homes for a few months of the year. There is no evidence of any schooling at that time in what became Burlington.

Fogelberg writes that Woburn hired a teacher (Samuel Carter) in 1685, to meet the 1642 state requirements, but very few, if any, students actually attended school. In 1713, the town built a schoolhouse, but classes were not always held there. Because families were scattered throughout the Woburn precinct (which included today’s Burlington, Wilmington and Winchester), school sessions were held in outlying districts to better accommodate those children. Fogelberg writes that these ‘moving schools’ continued from 1707 to 1742.

Fifty years later, in 1792, Woburn Town Meeting appointed a committee to recommend a uniform system of instruction. Members of the committee from the Second Parish (Burlington) included Reuben Kimball, John Walker and Rev. John Marrett. It was decided to divide the Second Parish into four school districts; four one-room schoolhouses were built here in 1794-95. They were known as the Center School, on what is now the Little League field at Simonds Park; the North School, now a private residence on Wilmington Road; the South School, located on what is now Blanchard Road (it was razed many years ago); and the East School, located on what is now Mountain Road (also razed a few years ago).

According to Fogelberg, Town Meeting voted in 1839 to move the Center School to the corner of Bedford and Francis Wyman roads; it was moved there to serve children living in that part of town, and became known as the West School. It is possible, according to historic preservationist John Goff that the school was actually moved to its current site earlier than 1839, for an 1831 town map shows a school on that site.

by Judy Wasserman, member of the Burlington Historical Commission Advisory Committee

From the Gazebo Archives

September 2007