The Romance of Norwalk

gogue. At the present time there are 100 sustaining mem¬ bers of the congregation. In connection with the above it is interesting to note that a Hebrew school was fostered by Jewish residents of the community more than 35 years ago. It met in Raymond’s hall, Washington st. At the present time, sessions are held in the Y. M. H. A. building, West Ave., between 85 and 90 pupils being registered. David Greenberg was instructor in 1929. Nine years ago, Jewish residents, feeling that they needed a meeting and social hall, met in the old South Norwalk Trust Co. building. Thus be¬ gan the Y. M. H. A. Six or seven years ago, Y. M. H. A. members decided on quarters of their own and forthwith ac¬ quired the large house which stood for many years at Mon¬ roe and South Main sts. Two years ago, the present commodious quarters on West ave. were purchased and the Y. M. H. A. moved into a new home. Eighteen years ago, in 19 11, the Swedish Lutheran Mes¬ siah church was organized, the church being erected on the present site, 8 Fort Point st. Rev. A. J. Okerblom of Bridgeport was the pastor and he still visits the church on occasion to preach. Services are usually conducted by a student pastor from Upsala College, N. J. The Church of the Nazarenes, Liberty Square, was organized December 14, 1926. The Rev. Alfred Anderson is the pastor. The Salvation Army at the present time has a flourishing branch at 24 Washington st. The story of the Methodist churches in Norwalk was given earlier in the history. SCHOOLS Chapter XXIII Deplorable Condition of Local Schools in 183Q — School Societies Labor Under Heavy Burden — Struggle For High School Lasts 38 Years — History of Present Public Schools — Private Institutions of Learning in Norwalk. Norwalk now appeared to be making rapid strides in all directions with the exception of that of education. The town fathers looked to the industrial progress of the town, kept watch on the finances and to the best of their ability, guarded the interests of the community. In keeping with the forward march, the Borough of Nor¬ walk was formally chartered on the first Wednesday of May, 1836. The following were the first borough officers elected July 1 1, 1 836 : Warden; Joseph W. Hubbell. Burgesses; William S. Street, Matthias Hubbell, Stephen T. Brewer, Stiles Curtis, Levi Clark, Timothy T. Merwin. Treasurer; Charles Thomas. Bailiff; James Stevens. Haywards; Levi Clark, Jason Merrill, William Cleveland, Richard Camp, Daniel Nash, Robert Cameron, John Wasson, Lewis Whitney, James S. Kellogg. Pound keepers; Eli Sanford, Nathan Jarvis, Matthias Hubbell, Buckingham Lockwood. Inspec¬ tor of coal, wood and hay; James Stevens. Inspector of grain; Edwin Lockwood. Inspector of butter; James Por¬ ter. The first meeting of the Burgesses was held at the Town House, July 18, 1836. On July 30, the following officers were named at a special meeting of the freemen of the Borough : 244 SCHOOLS 245 Fire inspectors: Charles Isaacs, Henry Selleck, Gould D. Jennings. Street inspectors: William I. Street, John Bur- rall, George St. John. Assessors: Moses Gregory, William St. John and Stephen T. Brewer. POOR SCHOOL CONDITIONS In the matter of education, Norwalk was exceedingly backward, the schools reaching a low water mark in the fourth decade of the 19th century. A discouraging out¬ look on the local situation was presented in the Connecticut Common School Journal for January and February 1839 which was in part as follows : “The schools figuring in this report were those in the Old Well, Flax Hill, South Center, North Center, Down Town, Pudding Lane, North West, Over River and North East districts. The best that can be said about this exposure is that the conditions here were similar to those which ob¬ tained in the state at large and that other towns were as remiss as Norwalk. The schoolhouses with few exceptions, were poor specimens of architecture and construction. Re¬ ferring to one building with two rooms the language of the report is: ‘A school is kept overhead, and the lowness and indistinctness of the voices which was witnessed, is believed to be owing in part certainly, to the usage of keeping the voices of the pupils supressed in order that the schools may not hinder each other.’ School rooms were poorly furnished. There was multiplicity instead of uniformity in text books. Twenty-one different reading books were in use in the schools of the town. An equal diversity of books was found in other branches of study.” It is not surprising that the public schools were in ill repute and poorly attended. In 1838, out of 941 children of school age, only 319 were in common schools, leaving 622 or nearly two-thirds of the whole without benefit from the public money. The total expenses of the schools amounted to about $3,500 or $11 for each registered pupil. ROMANCE OF NORWALK 246 Considering the value of money in those days, the poor schools cost enough to have been much better than they were. The taxpayer of that time was not especially interested, for little of his money went to pay the expenses of the public schools. The causes of this state of affairs, decidedly uncompli¬ mentary to a so-called progressive community, might well be laid to poor management by the school societies. These societies were the result of laws passed in 1795, 1 79 B and 1799, which took control of schools from the town and passed it into the hands of certain groups of townspeople designated as school societies. The First School Society of Norwalk, it is believed, was organized just before the close of the 1 8th century with Stephen Lockwood, Taylor Sherman and Ebenezer Phillips on the committee. The Society labored along as best it might without much co¬ operation from the town. The people felt that the respon¬ sibility belonged to the Society and they were perfectly will¬ ing that the group should shoulder it all alone. During the early years of the 19th century, the state provided a large sum of money for education and Norwalk received its just proportion. Instead of adding to this sum with local funds, the townspeople did their best to make the state appropriation cover all expenses and sought to keep the costs of the schools within this appropriation, so that they need not tax themselves a single cent for the upkeep of their own schools. Such an attitude struck the death knell of the progress of education in Norwalk for many years. Indeed, had it not been for the many private in¬ stitutions which sprang up during the decline of the public schools, Norwalk young people would have been very badly off for education. By 1853, school conditions in Norwalk had improved slightly, due in great measure to the manage¬ ment and help of Henry Barnard, who had been named secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools in Connecticut. He was virtually state school super¬ intendent. SCHOOLS 247 The State of Connecticut stepped boldly into the picture in 1856 and promptly abolished all school societies. This meant that the responsibility for the upkeep of the local schools was suddenly transferred from the First School So¬ ciety of Norwalk, to the town of Norwalk. The town took over all the districts in the community and in addition the South, Middle and North Five Mile River districts, which had, up to this time, formed part of the Darien School Society. Thus in 1856 we find Norwalk in control of some nine districts: Union, South Union, Down Town, North Center, North East, North West, North Five Mile River, Middle Five Mile River and South Five Mile River. Two more school districts were formed in the early i86o’s, the Broad River district in ’6o and the Center dis¬ trict in ’6 1. This brought the total number of school dis¬ tricts up to 11. A twelfth, if such it might be called, was formed by special act of legislature when Sheffield Island was constituted a separate school district “with all the priv¬ ileges and immunities belonging to the other school districts of this state.” The act was passed in 1859. Under the guardianship of the town, education in this community pros¬ pered. New schools were built, the old ones enlarged and remodeled. Norwalk took a generous step forward in the matter of education October 13, 1869, when it voted $15,- 000 for school expenses during the coming year “to make the schools free of expense to the districts of the town for the period of at least 30 weeks.” STRUGGLE FOR HIGH SCHOOL During the latter quarter of the 19th century, the ques¬ tion of a Norwalk high school came before the town meet¬ ings countless times, and it took the city fathers no less than 38 years to make up their minds on the subject of ad¬ vanced education for their sons and daughters, from 1871 to 1909. For many years the community offered a make¬ shift high school education in each of the schools of the ROMANCE OF NORWALK 248 four larger districts, South Norwalk, Over River, Center and East Norwalk, where high school departments sort of “grew up” in the schools. December 18, 1871 mention of a local high school first appeared in the town records and Edward W. Stuart was named to act with the Board of School Visitors to take up the matter of establishing a local high school. Two years later the Board was asked to draw up a list of scholars who were forced to go to other districts in the city, other than their own, in order to take up the higher education which was denied them in their own dis¬ tricts. At a town meeting held in May 1875, the report of the joint board of school visitors and selectmen on the subject of schools, advised using the schoolhouse in the Over River district for the purposes of a high school for advanced scholars. The report was accepted and laid on the table. In April, 1877, a committee which had been appointed four months previous to make an additional report on the advisability of a local high school, recommended the im¬ mediate establishment of an institution of higher learning. The meeting promptly killed any such recommendation, twice as many being of a negative, as of an affirmative mind.