We read that Painted Post had a school before it had streets. Public schools (and later public libraries) were precious to the hearts of New Englanders and northeasterners in our country’s earliest days. Massachusetts required towns to maintain schools back in the 1640s, lest “that old deluder Satan” ensnare people through ignorance. They had established Harvard in 1636, and a printing press two years later. John Eliot devised the “Massachusett” tongue into writing, and by 1663 was publishing Bibles (Up-Biblum God). Not just migration and culture, but the Northwest Ordinance, enacted by Congress in the 1780s, required public schools north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi.

As I look at things, it seems to me that there have been six or seven main waves of school construction here in our area.

The first, starting around 1800, is the wave of one-room schools. Some of these would operate for about 150 years. At the height there were pushing 400 such schools in Steuben County, and Town of Bath alone had 25. That seems like a lot until you remember that they had to be spaced so that small children could walk there.

In these schools one teacher would instruct all levels, while striving to keep order among those who were not directly engaged. Cooktown School in Bath (now Head Start) is the oldest local school building still used as a school. The school in Hornby Forks is a museum, while Steuben County Fair and Heritage Village of the Finger Lakes have one-room schools where they welcome visitors and conduct sample classes.

Approaching and following the Civil War we get the “academies” – essentially private schools offering a higher level of education, especially including college preparation, that the one-room schools couldn’t manage. Prattsburgh, Hammondsport, Naples, and Penn Yan all had such schools.

As the new century approached we began to see union schools, graded schools, and public high schools… sometimes by taking over the academies, as happened in Prattsburgh and Hammondsport. New schools went up in Bath, Howard, Greenwood. Cohocton, North Cohocton, Bradford, and many other local communities.

After the Great War, it was clear that even the newest of these schools couldn’t prepare children for life in the 20th century. New York State financially supported centralized schools, and modern new buildings went up in Savona, Campbell, Addison, Woodhull, Jasper, Bradford, Corning Northside, Bath, and Painted Post. Prattsburgh got a new school too, after the old academy burned down. It’s still in use a century later, along with the Savona, Campbell, and Addison schools. The Bradford and Northside schools are gone, but the others are still standing, though now put to other use.

You’d think that the Great Depression would have put school construction on hold, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal moved millions of families from relief rolls to payrolls by supporting new construction. Cutting-edge schools rose in Hammondsport (where they even had television, in 1936), Avoca, Arkport, Howard, Cohocton, Canisteo, probably Troupsburg, and possibly Greenwood. (All still exist, all except Hammondsport, Howard, and Greenwood are still schools.) Bradford got an addition, while Prattsburgh (still in use) got an addition AND a renovation.

With these marvelous new schools of the 20s and 30s, communities and educators might have felt that they’d finally “arrived.” But they hadn’t reckoned with the Baby Boom growth of school-age population, OR the lightning-fast advances in technology. By the 1950s new schools were going up in Corning, Painted Post, Hammondsport, Bath, and Wayland, though they often kept the older schools still in use. By 1961, the one-room schools were all gone.

And it still doesn’t stop – Bath and Bradford have built new since the Baby Boom, while others have added on. With many of our schools now a hundred years old, no doubt we’ll see some of them replaced as time goes on. But we owe a round of applause for our ancestors – going back to the 1630s – who built and sacrificed for times and generations far beyond what they could imagine.