 Figure 1: School #10 Sciota One-room schoolhouses were fundamental to American education for around 250 years. By 1913, half of all schoolchildren in the U.S. were going to one of the 212,000 one-room schoolhouses in the country. Beyond education, these schools were often integral to a community, offering a congregating space for the town to hold meetings, elections, and community events. Rural schools in America from the 18th-20th century were single-roomed because they existed to serve a small population: families in the immediate vicinity of the schoolhouse. A single school may have around 30 children in eight different grade levels, which could prove to be a lot for a single teacher. Because of this, there was no practical reason to add additional rooms or divisions to the building. This style of schooling began in the colonial period with the idea of free public education. Funding for schools came from tuition, land rental fees, and taxes. Parents had to shoulder the burden of fees for textbooks and school supplies, which could be a barrier to a child’s access to education. A teacher’s salary reflected the wealth of the families that supported the schools, which caused many teachers to seek jobs in towns where the pay was better. This often led rural schools to have teachers with fewer credentials. Many times the teacher lived with a community member, rotating through different host families. As the schooling of children in many different grades by one teacher was difficult, older children often helped teach the younger students how to read and write.
Prior to the Civil War, there was very little standardization in the American educational system. This started to change during the 1890s-1900s, when urban schools began improving their curriculum to fit the needs of the students. As the urban school developed, rural schools began to diminish in the eyes of American educators. This era saw a newfound push for standardization of textbooks and curriculum with a focus on skills that would well-adapt children for the growing industrialized workforce. This looked like learning a trade for boys, and domestic skills for girls. There was pressure on rural schools to implement reform and a widespread push for consolidated schools. Part of this pressure came from the federal government with President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 National Commission on Country Life, which sought to find solutions to rural problems. This included problems associated with rural schools such as lack of sanitation facilities and standardized teaching requirements. Many viewed it as the need to save rural students from their own schools. Those associated with this movement desired to model the consolidated rural schools after their urban counterparts. However, this created much pushback from some rural communities, and sparked debates both within communities and nationally.
There were 11 school districts targeted for consolidation which can be seen on the map here (see Figure 5 below). These include: Beaucaire, Chazy, Davenport, Dunn, Fordhams Mills, Miner, Moore, Saxes, Slosson, Trombley, and Waters Corners. Many of the schools in these districts were named after the road or location they were in, or the family whose land it was on. These naming practices were common for one-room school houses across the nation. For example, the school at the present-day Miner Farm and Ridge Road intersection is called “Miner Farm Ridge Road Corner” on a document listing all the pupils in that district (see Figures 7 & 8 below). Because the livelihood of many rural families depended on maximal agricultural production, rural schools were often built on small plots of land to preserve as much space as possible for farming.
There are lists for all the students in 10 of the districts shown on the first map, excluding Chazy. There is a separate list for boys and girls for each district, and in total there were 236 students. The lists show the children's age, grade, and distance from their school. The majority of kids lived two miles or less from their school. Looking at the map, each of the districts was over four miles away from where the proposed consolidated school would be. These extended distances in a time period when students walked to school show how important transportation was when designing a consolidated school. William Miner understood that the lack of reliable transportation methods and distance were very limiting factors to a child’s ability to access education. Students were taken to school either on a horse-drawn bus, which carried about 30 children, or an auto motor bus which carried about 40 children according to school records.
One of the main worries with consolidated schools was the loss of rural life as people knew it and the loss of the community center these smaller schools provided. People were worried that if schools prepared children for an industrial world, they would be more likely to leave home for the city, leaving fewer people remaining to run the farms. However, the Miners believed that agriculture was largely important. While CCRS was influenced by increased industrialization and the urban school model, there was still a focus on agriculture. This focus can be seen through the curriculum offered to students which strived to prepare them for the farm work of home as opposed to the industrial work of the city. Additionally, the consolidated district did not mean the loss of a centralized meeting place as many feared. Chazy Central Rural School remained at the heart of the community, hosting events such as film viewings in the 1,000 person auditorium. The school remains an integral pillar to the community to this day and a continual source of pride amongst the town’s residents.
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