Miss Church and the class assembled for a photograph outside Center School 1912. 

Until well into the 20th century, the children of Barkhamsted attended a number of one room schoolhouses in neighborhood school districts scattered throughout the town. The number of school districts varied greatly over the years with the fluctuations in population. In the 1840s we had six districts; in the 1850s we had twelve; in the 1880s we had eleven, and in the 1940s we had two. Decisions were made on a yearly basis as to whether to authorize a class in a particular school district or, in the interests of economy, to combine two nearby districts in one building. Children in the border districts were often sent to school in the neighboring towns, with Barkhamsted paying tuition. Children in surrounding towns sometimes attended Barkhamsted schools with those towns paying tuition here. Schools were also held in private homes or in vacant structures, as well as in specific school buildings. Each district managed its own affairs, hired its own teachers and maintained its own records. A town-wide board called the School Visitors exercised a minimal level of supervision over the districts, as well as allocated a small amount of State funds to them.

The population of Barkhamsted in the 1870s was about 1,300 people and there were about 250 children registered in a dozen schools. Why were there so many schools? Everyone had to walk to school. There were no school buses, no sidewalks to walk on, and the roads were not plowed. In winter the kids - even the youngest ones - had to trudge through the snow. There’s a limit to how far even tough farm kids can be asked to walk in bad weather, and in the 19th century that distance was about a mile and a half. So, schools had to be placed so that the kids could walk to them, and this led to the establishment of a number of small schools fairly evenly spread around the town. As the population changed and shifted, districts were added or closed, as were the school buildings. Generally speaking, each district would have a single one room school, but some districts with relatively large populations, such as Riverton and Pleasant Valley, might have a two-room school. In urban areas such as downtown Winsted or Torrington, there might be a school with several rooms, each housing a different grade level, but here in the country, the one room school was the standard well into the 1930s.

The manner in which schools operated has also changed over the years. In the 1870s a school year in Barkhamsted was 134 days; one of the shortest in the state. The State average was 176 days. In 1880 the Connecticut State legislature passed a law requiring that schools be in session for at least thirty-six weeks in each calendar year. But that didn't necessarily mean that students attended school for 180 days. Another law passed that same year made parents responsible for seeing that their children attended school for at least 60 days in twelve consecutive months. A third law required that when children under the age of fourteen were employed outside the home, the parents were to provide the employer with a certificate, signed by the teacher, testifying that the child had indeed attended school for the minimum amount of time as required by the law. It may be noted that prior to 1880 quite a few schools around the state, and most of the schools in Fairfield Country, had a 200 day school year.

Until the 1880s, schools usually had two distinct sessions, a winter school of twelve to fourteen weeks that began after Thanksgiving that was usually taught by a man; and a summer school that ran from May through September that was taught by a woman. While children could attend either or both sessions, the winter session was usually dominated by boys and older students, while the summer session focused more on the girls and the younger students. This two track system was driven by the fact that in the summer time, the boys and older girls were needed to help with the farm work. They couldn’t be spared to waste time on things like reading and writing. The younger kids on the other hand, would go to school during the summer, partially for education, and partially as a form of community day care. In the late fall, after the harvest was in, more of those older children could be spared to go to school. But at the same time, it would be harder for the girls and the little children to get to school because of the weather. The tradition of separate winter and summer sessions lasted for much of the 19th century, dying out sooner in the cities and later in the rural communities.

For much of the nineteenth century teaching was not so much a profession as a part-time job that just about anyone could do until something better came along. No specific training was required to be a teacher, but the candidate had to be interviewed and approved by the Board of School Visitors, a small group appointed by the town to supervise the schools. If the candidate was approved, a license such as the one shown below was written out, and the teacher hired for that term. Employment was for one term at a time with no guarantee of renewal; salaries were very low and working conditions were awful. Teachers were often teenagers with no formal training. The best that could be hoped for was a college student earning money for his tuition. As late as 1893 the official town report on Barkhamsted’s schools was mentioning the poor preparation that teachers brought to the post: "Six of the list of teachers never before had taught. They were comparatively school girls, until recently attending the same or similar district schools, stepping from the district scholar's bench to the district teacher's chair with little or not any special training for the position. That, under the circumstances, they had so fair success is more surprising than if they had met with flat failure."

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, many communities around the state began to look towards eliminating the independent local districts and moving towards a single town-wide organization. Such a reorganization would allow for the elimination of the one room schoolhouses and the creation of larger “consolidated” schools that organized their students into grades. This idea came to Barkhamsted in 1898 when the Annual Town Meeting considered “whether the Town will abolish all the school districts … and assume and maintain control of the Public Schools therein.” The vote was 35 in favor, but 107 against, a clear message that the local school districts still had considerable support. But change was in the wind, and in 1909 the State mandated that the town governments assume control of the local schools. The tiny local schools would remain open for a few more years but under more centralized control.

The painting by Winslow Homer called “New England Country School” gives us a good view of what a class in Center School would have looked like in the 1870s. The physical structure shown here is very close to what we have in our school: the curved ceiling, the two windows with a blackboard in the middle.