The grounds no longer echo with the joyous sounds of children at play and a bell no longer rings to summon reluctant students to class. Though it still stands, the school at Glenville hasn’t seen a pupil in nearly eight decades. It’s long been a private residence.
The school nonetheless represents a reminder that Glenville, but a ghost town today, was once a thriving and sizable village. It's like a time capsule, its walls containing stories of children at study and play and of the community they called home.
While Glenville was founded in the hills west of Newmarket around 1807, it remained little more than a sawmill and a scattered collection of farms for three decades. There were neither enough people to warrant a school, nor the means to provide for one.
Things changed after the erection of the Cawthra gristmill in 1836. In fact, the village grew so rapidly in the years immediately after that by 1839 it became apparent that a school was needed to educate the growing number of area children. Consequently, the entire community came together to raise a frame schoolhouse on a parcel of land donated by local farmer Augustus Rogers. By autumn of 1839, the school was ready for its inaugural class.
Enrolment in those days was between 35 and 50 students, peaking in the winter when the older boys, some as old as 22, were released from farm duties to learn reading and arithmetic until they were needed back in the fields come spring. These husky young men engaged in almost daily brawls, and it took a strong-willed individual to run the Glenville school. One unfortunate schoolmaster was thrown through the window by his students and promptly quit.
More successful at taming the students was Alexander Hall. When he arrived for his first day of school, Hall found the children had arranged a warm reception for him. The front door had been completely blocked by firewood, reaching as high as the roof. It was meant as a warning; the students were in charge here.
The young teacher was undeterred, however. He found an open window and ushered the students inside. All except for the boys, that is. It was their task to re-stack the firewood. If a student slacked in the task, he was driven to greater effort with a flesh-bruising crack of a birch rod. After this demonstration of authority, Hall had no further trouble with the students.
By the mid-1880s, the original schoolhouse was almost 50 years old and showing its age. In 1885 a new frame structure was built.
Almost 20 years ago I interviewed Russell Somerville, then 86 and a lifelong resident of Glenville who proudly called his ancestors among the earliest residents of the community. He had fond memories of attending class in the one-room schoolhouse.
One memory stood out. One night in February 1934, the gristmill burned to the ground. Come morning, the ruins were still smoking and smoldering, casting a dark pall over the village. Students naturally found it difficult to focus on their studies with so much excitement nearby. The teacher, Eliza Owens, tried to direct their attention to their lessons, but to little avail. Finally, she conceded defeat. “The mill was still burning on the second day, so our teacher let us come down to watch as sort of a class trip” explained Mr. Somerville. “I was about nine years old, and it was very exciting for me.”
The schoolhouse continued to serve Glenville until 1953, by which time the village it served was but a shell of its former self. In the years after the school watched as, one by one, most of the remnants of Glenville disappeared, victims of time and the elements of or redevelopment. Today, it’s one of precious few reminders of this once bustling village and the sometimes-rowdy children it produced.
