Early Schools: Part 3

"The old Buxton House deserves a passing notice. It was a double frame house, two stories high and the largest house in Peoria at the time it was built. It stood, as stated, where the Powell Block now stands, near the corner of Adams and Fulton Streets. It was built in 1834 by Hurd and Hamlin for old maid Buxton, as she was then called, and was occupied by Buxton and Wolford until Buxton died in 1835 and until his widow was compelled to leave it. It was a famous old house in its time and is now standing at Number 212 and 214 Glendale Avenue, where it was moved by Henry Mansfield, a number of years ago; it is now occupied as a tenement house. The old house did not extend beyond the porch shown. The two ends have been built since. Abraham S. Buxton was the editor of the Champion, the first newspaper printed in Peoria. He had what at that day was an extensive and well selected library. The books were sold by his administrator.

[Addition by J. Crandell... Miss Mary Waters taught a select school in the summer of 1839 or 1840; the school consisted of very young children. Miss Leah Thomas, now Mrs. Chas. Benton, who lives on Franklin street, at the head of Sixth street, was one of her scholars. Her only recollection of the school is, that Miss Waters was a very good, and a very pretty woman. She afterwards married John McClay Smith, a very stately old gentleman, who kept a grocery on the corner of Fulton and Washington street, where Zell's Bank now stands. She died about a year after her marriage. The following letter contains more than otherwise be given:

Your letter of inquiry is received. Am sorry, I can give you but meager information, as to my Aunt, Mrs. Mary Waters Smith, connection with Peoria schools. All I have for reference is an obituary notice printed in the "New York Observer", the year of her death, 1848.

"She came with her father, Rev. John Waters, with a colony from New York State, which settled on the site of the present city of Galesburg in 1835.

"She soon after engaged in teaching in a small log schoolhouse in Peoria county, also in several other schools in the state in successive years.

"In 1841 she went to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and taught six years, she returned to her father's house in spring of 1847 and the following June became the wife of J. McClay Smith, of Peoria, Ill.

"It is evident she taught somewhere in Illinois for five years, but when she taught in Peoria, what kind of school, ot how many scholars, I have no facts on which to base reply. She died August 7, 1848.

"In the summer of 1844, a convention was held at Peoria for the purpose of discussing a system of education for this state. The convention was attended by JOHN S. WRIGHT of Chicago; JUDGE H. M. WEAD, the father of S. D. Wead, the attorney; THOMAS KIRKPATRICK of Winchester, and others. They prepared a memorial to the Legislature which resulted in a new school law, but as usual, resulted in very little benefit to schools; --- in fact, a new school law was enacted at almost every session of the Legislature and repealed by the next. The different school laws enacted by our Legislature would make a very large volume if published together.

"John Porter taught here in 1844 in a schoolhouse on the bluff side of Washington Street, between Main and Fulton Streets, and afterwards in the Congregational church. He afterwards bought the lot on Main Street and built the building now occupied by McFadden as a bakery. He taught two or three terms in that building. His wife also assisted him and taught music. His son, Gib, then a chunk of a boy, assisted in teaching the young children. Mrs. Harry Van Buskirk remembers that Gib Porter taught her her letters. While this building was being made ready he lived on Fulton Street in the building across from the City Hall, now lately torn down. He afterwards moved his family back to Massachusetts. He was killed by the explosion of a boiler near Morris in Grundy County [Illinois]. Henry T. Baldwin, Jacob and Peter Frye, Clint Farrell, the Rouse boys, Lem Lindsay and Vic Hamlin, now the wife of Harry Van Buskirk, were among his pupils.

[Addition by J. Crandell..."Mr. Hooper taught up-stairs about where Clarke's Dry Goods Store on Adams Street is. He probably taught in 1846. Hooper was a fat old man, and in the habit of taking a nap after dinner. Sometimes, however, he would [play] "possum' on the boys. On one occasion he lay his head on his desk, apparently asleep, when one of the boys on a seat near him made some noise. Instantly the old man was awake and as he could not tell which boy was at fault, he deliberately thrashed the whole bench of boys, remarking, they probably deserved it anyway. Henry T. Baldwin and the two Merwin boys can remember and tell about this... end of addition by J. Crandell]

"William Frisby taught in the Old Lowry Church in 1844. Valentine Schlink was one of his pupils. He did not teach a full term. Business called him out of town and Ephraim Hinman taught the remainder of his term. He was not a teacher; he was a lawyer and taught school for lack of something better to do.

"Jim Anderson, the house mover, who turned the church around, said he used to go to school in it. Murry Blakesley, Johnson Cole and Valentine Schlink were also pupils in that school.

"Hinman also taught in this old church. Valentine Schlink distinctly remembers going to school there. He says he carried some maps for Hinman, when he removed to his school house on Monson Street.

**[footnote] Some interesting memories cling around the old church. It was built in the Spring of 1835 by John K. Lowery, a zealous old-school Presbyterian. It was undoubtedly the first building built for church purposes in Peoria. The building was sometimes called Keller's Church, because he preached there. The church is still standing substantially where it was built. It has been turned half around and now fronts on Jackson Street. just below Adams. A story has been added to it and it has been disguised with a coat of red paint. It has been occupied for over 40 years as a residence by Peter Hayden. Ballance gives some interesting reminiscences about the old church.

"Ephraim Hinman was a famous teacher in Peoria in the 1840's and 1850's. His principal school was in a plastered brick building situated on Monson Street. ... It was situated in a low place or sag and in wet weather was surrounded by water and a long plank for the pupils to cross on, extended from the sidewalk to the door. Bob Burdette has written up this Hinman school better than I can, and let Bob tell the story:

"Away back in the 1850's, "Hinman's" was not only the best school in Peoria, but it was the greatest school in the world. I sincerely thought so then, and as I was a very lively part of it, I should know. Mr. Hinman was the Faculty, and he was sufficiently numerous to demonstrate cube root with one hand and maintain discipline with the other. Dear old man; boys and girls with grandchildren love him to-day, and think of him among their blessings. He was superintendent of public instruction, board of education, school trustee, county superintendent, principal of the high school and janitor. He had a pleasant smile, a genius for mathematics and a West Point idea of obedience and discipline. He carried upon his person a grip that would make the imported malady which mocks that name in these degenerate days, call itself Slack, in very terror at having assumed the wrong title.

"We used to have "General Exercises" on Friday afternoon. The most exciting feature of this weekly frivolity consisted of a free-for-all exercise in mental arithmetic.

Mr. Hinman gave out lists of numbers, beginning with easy ones and speaking slowly; each succeeding list he dictated more rapidly and with ever-increasing complications of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, until at last he was giving them out faster than he could talk. One by one the pupils dropped out of the race with despairing faces, but always at the closing peremptory:

"Answer?"

"At least a dozen hands shot into the air and as many voices shouted the correct response. We didn't have many books, and the curriculum of an Illinois school in those days was not academic; but two things the children could do, they could spell as well as the dictionary and they could handle figures. Some of the fellows fairly wallowed in them. I didn't. I simply drowned in the shallowest pond of numbers that ever spread itself on a page. As even unto this day I do the same.

"Well, one year the teacher introduced an innovation; "compositions" by the girls and "speakin' pieces" by the boys. It was easy enough for the girls, who had only to read the beautiful thought that "spring is the pleasantest season of the year". Now and then a new girl would begin her essay --- "... Spring is the most pleasant season of the year," and we would call down with derisive laughter, whereat she walked to her seat, very stiffly, with a proud dry-eyed look in her face, only to lay her head upon her desk when she reached it, and weep silently until school closed. But "speakin' pieces" did not meet with favor from the boys, save one or two good boys who were in training by their parents for congress--men or presidents.

"The rest of us, who were just boys, with no desire to be anything else, endured the tyranny of compulsory oratory about a month and then resolved to abolish the whole business by a general revolt. Big and little, we agreed to stand by each other, break up the new exercise, and get back to the old order of things --- the hurdle races in mental arithmetic and the geographical chants which we would run and intone together.

"Was I a mutineer? Well, say, son. your Pa was a constituent conspirator. He was in the color guard. You see, the first boy called on for a declamation was to announce the strike, and as my name stood very high -- in the alphabetical roll of pupils -- I had the excellent chance of leading the assaulting column, a distinction for which I was not at all ambitious, being a strapling of tender years, ruddy countenance, and sensitive feelings.

However, I stiffened the sinews of my soul, girded on my armor by slipping an atlas back under my jacket and was ready for the frey, feeling a little terrified shiver of delight as I thought that the first lick Mr. Hinman gave me would make him think he had broken my back.

"The hour for "speakin' pieces," an hour big with fate, arrived on time. A boy named Aby Abbott was called up ahead of me, but he happened to be one of the presidential aspirants (he was mate on an Illinois river steamboat, stern-wheeler at that, the last I knew of him), and of course he flunked and "said" his piece -- a sadly prophetic selection --- "Mr. President, it is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope." We made such suggestive and threatening gestures at him, however, when Mr. Hinman wasn't looking that he forgot half of his "piece," broke down and cried. He also cried after school, a little more bitterly, and with far better reason.

"Then, after an awful pause, in which the conspirators could hear the beating of each other's hearts, my name was called.

"I sat still at my desk and said:

"I ain't goin' to speak no piece."

"Mr. Hinman looked gently surprised and asked:

"Why not, Robert?"

"I replied:

"Because there ain't goin' to be any more 'speakin pieces'."

"The teacher's eyes grew round and big as he inquired:

"Who says there will not?"

"I said, in slightly firmer tones, as I realized that the moment had come for dragging the rest of the rebels into court:

"All of us boys."

"But Mr. Hinman smiled and said quietly that he guessed there would be "a little more speaking before the close of the session." Then laying his hand on my shoulder, with most punctilious but chilling courtesy, he invited me to the rostrum. The rostrum was 25 feet distant, but I arrived there on schedule time and only touched my feet to the floor twice on my way.

"And then and there, under Mr. Hinman's judicious coaching, before the assembled school, with feelings, nay, emotions which I now shudder to recall, I did my first song and dance. Many times before had I stepped off a solo-cachuca to the staccato pleasing of a fragment of slate frame, upon which my tutor was a gifted performer, but never until that day did I accompany myself with words. Boy like, I had
chosen for my "piece" a poem sweetly expressive of those peaceful virtues which I most heartily despised. So that my performance, at the inauguration of the strike, as Mr. Hinman conducted the overture, ran something like this ----

"Oh, not for me (whack) is the rolling (whack) drum, or the (whack, whack) trumpet's wild (whack) appeal (boo-hoo!!). Or the cry (swish --- whack) of (boo-hoo-hoo!!) war when the (whack) foe is come (ouch!!) Or the (ow--wow!!) brightly (whack) flashing (whack -- whack) steel! (wah--hoo, wah--hoo).

"Words and symbols can not convey to the most gifted imagination the gestures with which I illustrated the seven stanzas of this beautiful poem. I had really selected it to please my mother, whom I had invited to be present, when I was supposed to deliver it. But the fact that she attended a missionary meeting at the Baptist church that afternoon made me a friend of missions forever. Suffice it to say, then, that my pantomime kept pace and time with Mr. Hinman's system of punctuation until the last line was sobbed and whacked out. I groped my bewildered way to my seat through a mist of tears and sat down gingerly and sideways, inwardly wondering why an inscrutable providence had given to the rugged rhinoceros the hide which the eternal fitness of things had plainly prepared for the school-boy.

"But I quickly forgot my own sorrow and dried my tears with laughter in the enjoyment of the subsequent acts of the opera, as the chorus developed the plot and action. Mr. Hinman, who had been somewhat gentle with me, dealt firmly with the larger boy who followed, and there was a sense of revelry for the next 20 minutes. The old man shook Bill Morrison until his teeth rattled so you couldn't hear him cry. He hit Mickey McCann, the tough boy from the Lower Prairie, and Mickey ran out and lay down in the snow to cool off. He hit Jake Bailey across the legs with a slate frame, and it hurt so that Jake couldn't howl --- he just opened his mouth wide, held up his hands, gasped, and forgot his own name. He pushed Bill Haskell into a seat and the bench broke.

"He ran across the room and reached out for Lem Harkins, and Lem had a fit before the old man touched him. He shook Dan Stevenson for two minutes, and when he let him go, Dan walked around his own desk five times before he could find it, and then he couldn't sit down without holding on. He whipped the two Knowltons with a skatestrap in each hand at the same time; the Greenwood family, 5 boys and a big girl, he whipped all at once with a girl's skipping rope, and they raised such a united wail that the clock stopped.

"He took a twist in Bill Rodecker's front hair and Bill slept with his eyes open for a week. He kept the atmosphere of that school--room full of dust and splinters, and lint, weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, until he reached the end of the alphabet and all hearts ached and wearied of the inhuman strife and wicked contention. Then he stood up before us, a sickening tangle of slate frame, strap, ebony ferule and skipping rope, a smile on his kind old face, and asked in a clear triumphant tones:

"WHO says there isn't going to be any more speaking pieces?"

"And every last boy in that school sprang to his feet; standing there as one human being with one great mouth, we shrieked in concerted anguish:

"NOBODY DON'T!!!"

"And your Pa, my son, who led that strike, has been "speakin' pieces" ever since.

Hinman afterwards taught in the public schools. It was probably one of these schools where the strike so graphically occurred. Hinman is still living, a hale old gentleman at Los Angeles, California.

About 1846 or 1847, Alfred Washburn taught school in the same place. He was a brother of Cephas Hercules Washburn well remembered by most old citizens. Washburn also taught over the old Post Office Building, which stood on the corner of Main and Adams Streets, where R.D. McDougal's Drug Store stands. P.C. Bartlett and Clint Farrell attended this school. Washburn was a fair teacher, a little inclined to let things take their course. He went from here to New Orleans, where he married and went to California, where, it is said, he died. He was a small man and very quick on his feet.

Part 3

Submitted by Steve Slaughter

Any contributions, corrections, or suggestions would be deeply appreciated!