NEW LIFE FOR AN OLD GEM
Thanks to the dedication of an increasing number of citizens, a neglected treasure is now being given the care it needs to become, once again, a contributing Wayne asset. This treasure is the large white clapboard building that sits across from the newly improved Andrew S. Knight Memorial Station of the Wayne Fire Department. Until recently, because of its run-down appearance, many people driving by simply might not have given it a second glance.
This gem of a building, the North Wayne Schoolhouse, built in 1854, is a tastefully designed and solidly constructed structure where generations of local youth received their formal education. A “cut above” the numerous one-room schoolhouses that can still be found across the state, it is two stories in height. Its architectural details are elegant. It boasts the rare feature of a light-filled, commodious second floor and -- rarer still -- a stage, this one framed by a proscenium arch. Our schoolhouse may well prove to be the only example of its kind still existing.
Like fine furniture and paintings, this jewel has a “patina,” a special glow, which only the passage of time can create. Unlike those treasures, though, the glow is not on its surface. The old interior and exterior walls are being scraped, plastered, and repainted. Its history, not its surface, is its patina. Being able to reconstruct, if only in imagination, the building’s history is as necessary as paint and plaster towards restoring its dignity and significance. And so, along with the preservation of the building itself, North Wayne Schoolhouse Preservation Committee has taken on the job of finding out about its past.
The Committee asked itself many questions. How, when and why did this treasure come to North Wayne? Why did the town need a new school then? Why did the town want such an elegant building when something less ambitious might well have served its basic needs? What was education like in past years? How did the school change over time, and what were the forces that drove that change? What were the students like? Their parents? What were their goals for the future? Did they attain them? What were the teachers like? Their training? Their conditions of employment? Their duties? Under what guidance did the school fulfill its purpose? What were the surrounding conditions, both locally and nationally, that had an impact on the education it provided? How do the people who attended it remember what went on within its walls and on its playfields? And what was its eventual fate?
An in-depth history of the Wayne schools, a future project of the Committee, would contain answers to all these questions. But for now, those who have come to know this building see that Wayne could benefit greatly from having it available to serve the public in the years ahead. Rescued from obscurity, given the right kind of attention, the North Wayne Schoolhouse promises to be a jewel that Wayne could proudly wear.
We have been fortunate to have the assistance of the Wayne Historical Society and the collection it has assembled in the vault of the Cary Memorial Library. Many questions are yet to be answered. But we have begun.
The 1898 History of Wayne is the source to which we first turned. We were richly rewarded. George W. Walton, whose work as Superintendent we detail later, was the author of the school chapter. Rooms in private houses, not public buildings, had served as educational facilities until the year 1811, when the town voted that $50.00 be appropriated towards building a public school building. It was located “a short distance west of R.E. Morrill’s dwelling house,” which is (according to the vault’s 1879 map of Wayne) where Doug and Holly Stevenson now live. This was an “old style, square building with a hopper roof.”
Just exactly what “a hopper roof” is, it may be impossible to tell with certainty. The term was used around 1720 to describe the roof of the West Falmouth MA Friends Meeting House, a “triangular shaped roof, at its peak a hole to let out the smoke” of the charcoal fire used for heating. Possibly the school’s hopper roof let out the smoke of the large fireplace that would take “a cord wood stick in length” of four feet. The author notes that pupils who stood by the fire to warm their feet held their books in front of their faces to keep off the burning heat. However, this explanation is not truly satisfactory as the fireplace probably most certainly had a chimney to draw out the smoke that otherwise would have filled the room. Did "hopper" simply mean "triangular?"
The building was unpainted, probably both inside and out. Inside, “on either side of an open space, the floor rose on an inclined plane which was occupied by rows of seats,” on one side the boys, on the other the girls. One imagines the schoolteacher traversing, from time to time, the “open space” from the front to the back of the room, looking both left and right to enforce, at a glance, learning and discipline.
In addition to schooling, the building was used for “religious meetings.” Perhaps that was why it was the Reverend Comfort C. Smith, who probably conducted those meetings and would become the first minister of the North Wayne Church built in 1851, who informed the Selectmen in 1811 that there were 84 students from 18 families then in attendance.
Subsequently, in 1835, by which time the student population had probably reached around 120, a brick house 20’ by 28’ was built near the site of the present building at a cost of $264.32.
By 1854, the student population had reached 151 and the sum of $1200 was raised for the purpose of a new schoolhouse. Among the four-member school committee was J.F. Jennings (whose descendants still live in Wayne) and William Knight -- perhaps a relative of the appointed builder, Francis Knight.
To find out what explains this rapid growth in student population and the relatively large sum dedicated towards a new school, we turned to A History of the North Wayne Tool Co. (2003) by Wayne local historian Edward L. Kallop, Jr.
The land and plant that would become the North Wayne Tool Company was purchased in 1840 by a certain Reuben Dunn, who, joining up with Josiah F. Taylor, took the Company into a period of rapid growth largely due to the very “innovations” that made Henry Ford an icon of American industry: division of labor and the “assembly line” manufacturing process. Rapid growth in the Company meant rapid growth in employees, and growth in employees mean growth in the number of children of employees. Hence the need for the 1854 building. And hence, because of the Tool Company’s prosperity, the unusual sum devoted to it, its graceful appearance and its generous size.
If, as it later will emerge, the North Wayne Tool Company and the North Wayne Church as well as the North Wayne School were all tied together in close (for our era) ways, the reason is revealed by Kallop’s narrative. The Reverend Comfort Smith, already mentioned in this account, was a very early, very prosperous, very capable, and very religious man -- a preacher who preached for free -- who sold the land upon which would be located the future North Wayne Tool Company to a certain Thomas G. U. Fisk, who then sold it to Dunn. He remained involved with all three enterprises. A condition of employment in the Tool Company was attendance at the Church; a benefit of employment at the Tool Company was the education of one’s children in the Schoolhouse. A very close society, very efficiently constructed; and, one hopes, a society within which it was possible to have a satisfying life.
It would be only two years later, in 1860, that scandal and bankruptcy hit the Company. The origin of the trouble was not North Wayne, but Oakland, and not because of a North Wayner, but because of the company’s treasurer, whose name to this day is unknown (although two likely candidates were from -- where else? -- Massachusetts). But by then the Schoolhouse had been built. So it has stood until this day -- relatively unaffected by the fortunes of the Tool Company, which would improve in future years and then decline. Its own eventual discontinuance as a schoolhouse would come about for a very different reason having to do with national, not local, changes.
For information about the years following the opening of the school, one turns, first, to reports of the Wayne Annual Meeting, and then, beginning in 1882, to the Annual Reports of the town. In 1882, Mr. George W. Walton began as supervisor of schools, an unpaid stewardship that lasted until 1899. If any one person could be singled out as responsible for the early success of education in the town of Wayne, it was he. Annually, he reviewed each teacher’s performance, reported glowingly and acutely on those who were doing well, and with restraint mentioned those who were not, after which that teacher’s name would no longer appear on the payroll. He looked for excellence in his hires. Continually he exhorted parents not to keep their children from school for the purposes of farm labor or for “some fancied wrong by the teacher.” By his example, he taught the value of education and good teachers. He called attention to the unequal quality of schools in different parts of the town. He oversaw the abolition of the “district” system of smaller schools in favor of the more unified “town system.” He initiated a “Roll of Honor” for perfect attendance and saw that it was printed in the annual report. And then, beginning in about 1895, he oversaw the initial system-wide consolidation that came about after the Civil War due to depletion of rural population in favor of urban manufacturing hubs. In 1896 he noted the upcoming Wayne Centennial by praising the town’s “immediate forefathers who took great interest in education.” “The problem of problems” for the future, he said, is “How shall the youth be trained?”
Extending public education into the high school years was tried out and then adopted beginning in around 1885; beginning around 1913, consolidation brought about the tuitioning-out to private schools of Wayne’s high school students. And eventually, in 1962, consolidation would end the life of the building as a schoolhouse in favor of the Wayne school, area high schools and selected preparatory schools. Many Wayne students, then as now, sought post-secondary education.
State legislation and the work of the State Superintendent upgraded the standards for education in Wayne, as they did across the state. The state mandated the purchase of textbooks, a significant expense. Commissioner Walton exhorted the proper care of them; later, he required that parents be charged for any that were unreturned. Further research into the titles he named will provide insight into the actual content of a North Wayne education.
Scarlet fever and influenza epidemics closed the schools in 1887 and 1890 respectively. In 1917, the position only recently instituted, the school physician reported on the poor health of a significant portion of attendees.
In 1918, four years into World War I, the State Superintendent appealed for the formation of corn clubs and victory gardens. “All the vegetables we can raise, all the wood we can cut, will be our little bit toward winning the war,” he wrote.
The 1920s and 1930s brought changes in state education laws as well as teaching staff. Sanitary facilities were brought indoors, unfortunately into the basement, where annual flooding created problems that two decades of parental concerns never resolved. With the advent of rural delivery of electricity in the early 30s, the State required that electric lighting replace oil-burning lamps. The building’s generous windows, though, still provided a great deal of natural light so long as open fields surrounded it.
But some things remained constant until the building's closure. Wood heat, with the wood supplied by local farmers and stacked by students, was one. The nearby postmaster would start the fire; the teacher and older boys would keep it stoked. With no kitchen, students ate cold lunches from home. The old school bell still rang; there were multiple grades in a single classroom.
In the final years, though, consolidation meant that only certain grades came to North Wayne, and they were bused there, motorized vehicles having replaced the horse-drawn "pung." Even North Wayne kids who previously had walked to school began to be picked up. Friendly pet dogs would sometimes board alongside their masters, to spend the day at school.
A noticeable change in staffing shows up in early 20th century reports. Women, attending colleges in greater numbers, could continue to teach after marriage, something previously not allowed. The North Wayne School now lists Edna Wallingford, Cora Libby, Mary Scribner Barker, and Mrs. Walton as teachers. Town reports record many illnesses as well as pervasive dental needs among the students. The Great Depression, which changed life in urban areas more than in rural, goes unmentioned, but WWII does not; students were active in the collection of tin for the war effort.
As it had for decades, though, a hand-painted stage curtain by local artist E.L. Crosby still hung upstairs. It depicted no local or national scene, but a charioteer in a Roman coliseum urging on his horses. From this stage generations of the town’s children, sons and daughters of farmers, loggers and mill workers, had performed their pageants and competed in their spelling bees and recited their memorized speeches. Like so much in children’s lives, the message they may have gotten would have been unspoken, but surely it was powerful.
This jewel’s special glow is its history. What does its history tell us the message was? That the building itself and the efforts of those who guided and taught in it, through times both of economic prosperity and scarcity in this rural Maine town, somehow always urged its children to think of themselves of citizens of a larger world? To make their voices heard in it perhaps, but certainly to live in it with pride? The research the Committee has done so far points towards “yes” as an answer.
But this old stone does need a bit of polishing up. And it cries out for a new setting -- one not made of gold or platinum, but of imagination and creativity, foresight and commitment, because only then will it serve the useful purposes that will make it a part of the town’s ongoing life. So another question the committee asks is one which cannot be answered from historical sources, but of Wayne‘s citizens: what will be its future?
Much preservation work has already been accomplished through private and public sources of funds. A great deal remains. We hope you will be a part of this effort. Likewise, we seek your support guiding this fine jewel towards a new and vital place in Wayne’s life as a community.
