Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 14

As the son of a mechanic and church lay leader, Charles had as much education as his family could afford, which meant by the age of 12, a combination of school and work would have to satisfy his natural curiosity. They had moved back East from Michigan when he was eight, so he would have attended one of the seven or eight district schools in West Boylston, which included “writing school” and “singing school.” Summer terms were eight weeks, and winter terms nine and a half weeks, for a little more than four months’ public schooling for the year. There was no high school, as with just 1,600 residents in 1840, West Boylston didn’t have the 500 families required by the state to offer advanced education.

The district classrooms would have been more crowded in winter, as greater numbers of older boys came when there was little farm work to do. A single schoolteacher would have maintained order. With permission, and even encouragement from the West Boylston School Committee, teachers had the right to use corporal punishment, as it “certainly has the sanction of the Holy Scriptures, and the example or practice of the wise and good in all ages of the world.”

“In our opinion,” wrote the three-member School Committee in 1847, two of whom were local ministers:

...corporal punishment should never be the first, but always the last resort...When other proper methods fail to secure obedience, or correct faults, then let no modern instrument of torture, no ingenious contrivance for the infliction, or prolongation of pain, but the ancient rod of correction be taken in hand.

After moving to Clintonville at 13, Charles, known to his relatives as “Charley,” and his younger brother Henry attended the District 10 school called Chapel Hill. This brown wooden building on the corner of Main and Sterling streets served as a chapel on Sundays, and in fact was the first site of the same church his father helped to organize, the Second Evangelical Church of Lancaster. When that congregation moved, the Baptists used the chapel.

In an 1846 description of Clintonville, there were “two small schoolhouses, one of wood and the other of brick... South of these were several boarding and tenement houses owned by the Clinton company who were manufacturing coach lace in the old yellow mill,” noted Morse. This neighborhood is where the Morgan family lived from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s. As late as 1856, when the first town directory, the Clinton Almanac, was published, Hiram Morgan’s address was listed as “15 Clinton Corp.,” which meant company housing, quite possibly on Nelson Street, a narrow street of brick row houses which remain standing today.

While Massachusetts had been an early adopter of mandatory schooling, funding that education remained primarily a local issue. Records from 1843 show District 10 received $163 from the town of Lancaster (worth close to $4,200 in today’s dollars), plus $15 for library books the following year, equal to more than $450 today. Each district had its own small library, and families often shared the collection among themselves, or swapped with other districts to expand their choices. In 1844, the state gave Lancaster $1,400 to divide among its 13 school districts, roughly $35,300 in today’s dollars, and hardly generous by today’s standards.

The District 10 school was on a small hill with a grove of white oaks. Local newsman Wellington Parkhurst recalled its acorns more than 50 years later, “the plenteous fruit of which the boys used as missiles in their mimic wars.” Studying under those trees was a privilege for the best-behaved students. Behind the school was a pole topped with a wheel that had ropes hanging down. Boys “counted it rare sport to grasp the end of these ropes and ‘swing around the circle.’”

Charles’ brother Henry invented the game, Parkhurst noted, calling it an “artistic device.” In an early demonstration of the family’s mechanical creativity, Henry is recalled as “a bright scholar, and later developing musical genius, who in hours devoted to the making of mechanical experiments thus illustrated his talent for improvising methods of recreation.” Henry went on to become a popular music teacher in town, before joining his brother in several business enterprises.

The school had separate doors for boys and girls, and separate seating inside, boys on the south side, girls on the north. Heating was a constant concern for one student, who recalled years later:

There was a fireplace in one corner of the room in which large logs of wood were piled, and in cold weather we would nearly blister ourselves while warming and so cold were our backs that the chills played between our shoulder blades, unless the backs had been recently basted with the tough birch or hickory.

The school accommodated 40 students on double seats, with the younger “primaries” in front. During the 1843-44 school year, when Charles was 13, the oldest student was 19, and the youngest, 3, with the average age about 10. School committee records show that 91 students between the ages of 4 and 16 attended at some point during 1844. The curriculum included reading, spelling, writing, grammar, geography, natural philosophy (science) and bookkeeping. Unlike in West Boylston, the school year was more than 30 weeks long, divided into winter and summer terms.

Blackboards on all four walls were “constantly in use,” Parkhurst recalled, “in recitations in arithmetic, geography and grammar, and in spelling exercises.” Students would often stop what they were doing to listen to the recitations of carefully memorized passages. Those who had trouble memorizing their lines would stay after school or come on Saturdays.

The Morgan family’s fortunes must have improved the next year, as a teenaged Charles enrolled at the prestigious Lancaster Academy, located on the town’s “Old Common,” and attended two terms there in 1845 and 1846 as a day student. The school’s 1845 catalog described the institution’s approach to education:

The Teachers of this school endeavor to impress upon the minds of their pupils that success in any branch of study, depends upon close application and persevering effort on the part of the scholar. They are not so desirous that a great amount of knowledge should be acquired, as that those habits of study should be formed which are the most valuable to the student.

The young man with a high forehead and prominent chin proved to be an apt pupil, as he learned in those brief terms how to apply himself to new subjects, lessons he applied for the rest of his life. He studied languages, most likely Latin.

A term’s tuition depended upon which track the student pursued, ranging from $3.00 for “common English branches,” $3.50 for “higher English branches,” $4.00 for instruction in Latin, Greek, or French, $4.50 “in two of them,” or $5.00 for all three, or what would be about $120 in today’s dollars. Piano and drawing lessons were also available. Resident students paid $1.50 to $2.00 weekly for room rent, board and washing.

A coeducational school, Lancaster Academy attracted students from the immediate area as well as Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Nantucket. Among Charles’ 107 classmates were John D. Washburn and Henry S. Nourse, who both went on to Harvard University. Washburn later served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, and Nourse became a civil engineer, steel works superintendent and local historian.