The Neighborhood of the Little Red School House
By Alnorca
Many a Collins girl taught her first term of school in District No.8 and the memory of the little red school house beneath the magnificent elm on the corner is dear to her heart. Many a youngster, grown to maturity and in a distant state, recalls, with homesickness, happy hours spent in these, the most beautiful rural school surroundings in the township.
Among the early settlers in this part of Collins, Colonel Sylvanus Cook is outstanding. He was born in Massachusetts in 1795. His family moved to Dan by, VT and from there at the age of nineteen, he, with his bride, Nancy Phillips, joined the exodus of adventurous youth to western New York to help tame a wilderness. He cleared land at what was later known as Nichol' s Corners-the first settler in that part of Concord. He was soon joined by Nehemiah Paine and Jeremiah Richardson-grandfather of Arthur Richardson of Seneca Heights. Of Jeremiah, Sylvanus writes-"He was not marred then but said he had a wife picked out." Four or five years later, Mr. Cook sold his holdings to Levi Nichols and moved to Bagdad on land now belonging to the State Farm. In 1823, another move was made, this time to the region south of Collins Center where he acquired an extensive acreage, built a house and reared and old fashioned family of twelve children. While living in Concord, he attended "general training" at Townsend Hill. He now transferred activities in this line to Zoar and in 1838 was given the rank of Colonel in the 198th Regiment of Infantry .The commission was signed by Wm. Marcy, then governor of New York. His sword, with its handle of bone surmounted by a brass eagle head, is in the possession of his grandson, Edwin Phillips.
Four of the Colonel's children settled on farms purchased from the paternal tract. Two of these are still in the hands of his descendants-the home farm, which the late Arthur Cook inherited from his father, Hiram and the one belonging to Wymann Phillips, which was part of the gift of Sylvanus to his daughter Sally, when she married Andrew Phillips, almost a century ago.
On the corner east of the school house there once stood a weather-beaten building about which one of the Colonel's daughters observed, "Nearly everyone in the neighborhood has lived at some time in that old house." At one time it belonged to her brother Alonzo who left it to become a Baptist minister. Ashford Hollow was one of the first fields of service and Cherry Creek the last. The final owners of the old dwelling were Edgar and Bertha Shaw who began their housekeeping under its roof and in 1877 moved it to the rear to make room for their new home, now the residence of Fred Bleemaster.
The farm adjoining the east, the present property of Geo. Edie, has also passed through many hands. Chauncey Cook and his beautiful and vivacious bride, Melissa Potter, lived there. For many years it was the home of Harvey Shaw. To it, in the thirties, came another Vermont pioneer, Joel Phillips, father of the Phillips family in Collins. A visitor to the brown dwelling, long ago, would enter a doorway, flanked by benches backed by lattices, in a colonial fashion now being revived.
1830 found Job Irish clearing the land across the road to the east. His son Daniel built the homestead now occupied by Albert Raecher. The little red school house had it romances. One blossomed when young Chauncey Judd came to teach in it and married Daniel's daughter, Ellen. Mr. Judd became a well-known horseman with stables at Wesley, where the two spent their lives.
This story was repeated when another young man, L. D. Bacon, came on a like pedagogic mission, boarded with Albert Becker and fell in love with Sarah, the daughter of the house. He took her to Canaseraga where eventually her family followed. In time Albert's grandson, Lloyd, inherited the farm and a Becker once more dwells upon the Becker acres as in the old days.
So strong was the Baptist thought in this small community, that a Freewill Baptist church was erected upon the farm of Sylvanus Bates. It was never prosperous enough to support a resident pastor but there was no lack of visiting elders to "expound the word." One of these was Elder Holt, remembered and loved long after the old church had ceased to be used.
Those were the days of extreme dogmatism. A story often related by Jerry Pierce of Gowanda, who was present at the meeting, hung on a sermon in which the elder quoted the old Calvinistic doctrine that hell is paved with the skulls of unbaptised infants scarcely a span long.
"I believe it," exclaimed one of the deacons.
"If it is true," came back free-thinking and free-spoken Timothy Clark of Collins Center, they are spiked down with deacon’s teeth. "
There are men and women who were boys and girls in the seventies who recall Deacon Sylvanus Bates as a tall, handsome man with clear cut features framed in snowy hair and under-chin whiskers who, notwithstanding his eighty odd years, could 'jump up and hit his heels together twice" before they returned to the floor-a stunt that his youthful audience tried in vain to imitate. The large house now owned by Byron and Henry Bates was built in 1878 by Mrs. Butler Potter, the deacon's granddaughter. At about the same period, the nearby sheds-last remnant of the church which had helped to mold the thought of three generations-were torn down.
District No.8 embraces on its western border the land, to which in 1810 Aaron Lindsley came and felled the giant hemlock on the spot where he built, first, a brush shanty, then a log cabin and finally the present Foster house. His nearest neighbors at that time were the Wilbur’s at Collins Center who, until his family arrived, helped out with the baking.
Edward Foster, Sr., who bought the place about 1861 and whose descendants still live on it, came from Otto to Tubtown to work for the Plumbs when a young man. On this farm there remained at the beginning of the century, one of the last stands of virgin forest in the country .In 1900, according to a news item, severe winds blew down a white oak that yielded $14 worth of wagon spokes, 2400 feet of plank which sold for $40 and 14 cords of wood. More than $70 was realized from the tree.
During the nineties a cheese factory, the Prairie Queen, was built at the junction of Foster and Lone roads. It was carried on successively by Clayton Brigham, Isaac Skuse and Clark White. About the same time, Charles Kysor built and operated a sawmill across the road from the Bleemaster home which he then owned. Both industries prospered for a few years.
What is known as the Goldthwaite farm was purchased from the Holland Co. in 1818 by Jason Nichols. This is now the property of Carl Peters and the home of the Peters Dairy, which supplies milk in Gowanda, Collins and Collins Center.
The first school house on the corner was made of logs and stood closer to the elm tree than its successor. Built during the twenties, it served the settlement until 1852 when the little red school house was erected. The district was then No.17 and the sum of $25 was paid Colonel Cook for the site. Here five generations of Cooks and Phillips’ have come to tilt with the three R’s. The latest representative of the line is seven year old Donald Bleemaster. .
The first teacher in the little red school house whom Edgar Shaw of Pasadena, Cal. Remembers, was Helen Reynolds, sister of Elliot Reynolds of Collins Center. Besides himself, her pupils were Louisa Goldthwaite (Lyde Gurney) and her sister Eunice (Mrs. Moore), Alice, Delilah and Chauncey Phillips (Josiah Phillips children), Justus and Seth (children of Andrew Phillips), Sarah Bates (potter), Walter and Alice Allen who lived in the Foster house, Ashley Patch, Dora Irish, Myron Walker, "Nick" and Lana Shearer (Smith).
Other teachers were Ellen Irish, Linda Walden (Tucker), Robert Sniggs, Mina Southwick (Taft) and Bertha Kimball (Shaw).
A beloved teacher of the nineties was Elida Sisson (Livermore) who was retained term after term, when the tenure of a rural teacher under the two terms a year regime of the day, often ceased after the first.
Thirty-six years ago the red school house encountered an unprecedented crisis. There were no pupils and dissension arose in regard to continuing as District No.8 or uniting with District No.6 of Collins Center. Merle Phillips solved the problem by attaining his fifth birthday. Josephine Vail (Cook) was hired as teacher and the two carried on.
Centralization and consolidation are dominant notes in the social cycle that is sweeping the world. Sooner or later the little red school house and its like must give way to the new order but will not something very dear and very American pass from the countryside when no longer "sits the school house by the road.”