#schooldistrict

[yatescountyhistorycenter]

Working for the children

By Jonathan Monfiletto

Susan Miller Dorsey already had nearly two decades of teaching experience under her belt when she began teaching Latin at the only high school in Los Angeles, California in 1896. Thirty-three years later, when she retired as superintendent of the Los Angeles school district, she had overseen the doubling of the student population of the fastest-growing school district in the world during the 1920s. At the time of her death in 1946, Dorsey had been the only living person to have a school in Los Angeles named after her.

Historian Rich MacAlpine captured Dorsey’s life in a nutshell for a March 2009 article in Yates Past, the bi-monthly newsletter of the Yates County History Center, that was reproduced in MacAlpine’s 2014 book Yates County Chronicles, so I won’t duplicate his efforts in this article. Just briefly, I will mention Susan Miller was born to James and Hannah Miller, of County House Road in Jerusalem, on February 16, 1857. She seems to have attended Jerusalem School District No. 17 in her childhood, and then she graduated from Penn Yan Academy at the age of 16 in 1873. After four years at Vassar College, she graduated in 1877 and embarked on a 20-year period of teaching in higher education as well as a career in social work. Marrying Patrick Dorsey – a fellow Yates County native – in 1881, Susan moved with her husband to California, where he was called as a pastor, shortly afterward.

From 1896 to 1902, Dorsey taught at Los Angeles High School and also served as the head of the school’s classical department. Her tenure with the Los Angeles school district follows a time in which her husband, taking their son, Paul, with him, decided to travel for better health and apparently abandon his wife in the process. However, Dorsey never described herself as divorced but did list herself as widowed upon Patrick’s death in 1927.

From 1902 to 1913, Dorsey presided as vice principal of the school, and then in 1913 she was selected assistant superintendent of the school district – the first woman to hold the position. She broke the glass ceiling yet again in 1920 when she was chosen to be the superintendent of the school district, despite her misgivings over the position and apparent desire not to hold it. While she is described as the first woman in the United States to be the superintendent of a metropolitan school system, a contemporary newspaper article lists her as the only woman in the country to hold such a position and notes this is a distinction for a former resident that Yates County should be proud of.

During her time at the helm of the Los Angeles school district, Dorsey accomplished several educational initiatives. According to newspaper accounts of her career, she established a visual education division, a classical center, an Americanization department, and three types of schools for practical and vocational preparation. She also enlarged the health and physical training sections and the elementary school library. She was an early advocate of the importance of kindergarten, and in her free time she volunteered in the city’s social welfare programs. This included working with the Chinese community and tending to those with tuberculosis as well as being a temperance advocate.

Her aim was to “solve vocational problems and train character,” she said, and she oversaw a school district whose area measured 965 square miles, with 400 schools and a $30 million budget ($544 million in today’s money) by the time she retired. In her near-decade as superintendent, the population of Los Angeles increased from 500,000 to 1.2 million while the student population increased from 135,000 to 350,000. School facilities tripled in size during that time as well.

In fact, having witnessed the present and foreseeing the future, Dorsey urged upon the importance of spacious grounds to allow room for future growth. “It is through her foresight and vision that school sites range from five to thirty acres, as she always has insisted that Los Angeles must look to future expansion and that the children of its citizens must build strong bodies on its school playfields,” one newspaper article stated.

Dorsey used her position to advocate for the modernization and advancement of education as the world modernized and advanced, noting in a speech “that young people be trained to become useful members of society should be the most important phase of education,” according to a newspaper article. The article captured the message of Dorsey’s speech this way: “The education that answered for the child of forty years ago when the world lived without telephones, automobiles, submarines, amplifiers, and the many electrical devices at command, will not fit the child to live in the world today.”

She also led a teacher-citizen committee that planned a convention to give parents the opportunity to hear from the greatest experts in child training in the country. “The movement to educate parents better to enable them in the upbringing of their children is state-wide,” one newspaper reported, stating an analysis of high school students “shows that some of the problems are lack of knowledge by parents, lack of supervision of the child’s leisure time, lack of acquaintance by parents with the companions of the child, lack of sympathetic cooperation with the child’s friends, lack of understanding, broken homes, and discordant homes.”

Under Dorsey’s leadership, the committee studied the need for recreational facilities such as playgrounds and indoor community centers as well as the need to diminish students’ heavy loads of homework and activities to allow them and their parents to address home and community problems. She was recognized for helping improve the health of schoolchildren, accomplishing beneficial reforms for the city’s public school system, and seeking to address such problems as the need to house the ever-increasing number of children moving into the district.

Dorsey received her third four-year contract in January 1928 with a salary of $12,000 ($218,000 in today’s money) and a stipulation that she could leave the school district before the end of her term. Indeed, she later announced her retirement effective in January 1929. With this announcement, she was hailed as “for the past ten years been considered the outstanding woman in the educational world on this side of the Atlantic” and “one of the most famous women in recent generations to claim Penn Yan and Yates county as her birthplace.”

The cornerstone for Susan Miller Dorsey High School was laid in December 1936, and the school opened the following September. Dorsey died on February 5, 1946 at age 88 – less than two weeks shy of her 89th birthday – at Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been a patient for a short time following an illness. During one of her last public appearances on January 17, she spoke before the board of education in favor of character training for young people and joked that her greatest mistake was resigning, since she no longer could work as closely with the students, which was her chief interest in life.

[k12academics]

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[sparrowatheart]

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[yatescountyhistorycenter]

The other round-stone schoolhouse

By Jonathan Monfiletto

For a building that is no longer standing – and that hasn’t stood for well over a century – the Round Stone Schoolhouse is a gem in Yates County. Formally known as Potter School District No. 5, the schoolhouse is unique in that – for 80 years of its existence – it was a schoolhouse made out of cobblestones.

According to a Wikipedia entry, historians estimate that at least 75 percent, and perhaps as much as 90 percent, of cobblestone buildings in the United States are within 70 to 75 miles of Rochester – largely due to that major city’s proximity to Lake Ontario, from where the cobblestones were gathered. And here in Yates County, we had a schoolhouse constructed from these smooth, round stones.

The schoolhouse was built in 1838, round in shape with walls two feet thick built of field stone and faced with cobblestones. The cobblestones may have been drawn by wagon from Lake Ontario, or they may have been picked up in neighboring fields. The structure was 30 feet in diameter and 11 feet high, with seven windows and seats arranged in the style of an amphitheater.

In 1919, an explosion of gas in the chimney started a blaze in the wooden part of the building, destroying the wooden infrastructure and damaging the stone walls. The following year, the school was taken down, and a wooden school house was put up in its place. That structure is also no longer standing, and a historical marker is all that remains on the site.

Here are the Yates County History Center, the Round Stone Schoolhouse is a gem also because it was the school Caroline Underwood – the namesake for the L. Caroline Underwood Museum – attended as a young girl. However, if my recent research is correct, it was not the only cobblestone schoolhouse ever located in Yates County.

Looking more into the history of the town of Middlesex through our research files, I came across the following typewritten but otherwise unidentified statement in the folder: “Another round stone schoolhouse stood for a time near Pine Corners on the Middlesex-Rushville road. In the late 1830s the district decided to replace the old school. Men drove to Lake Ontario to get cobblestones for its construction. Part of the school benchs [sic] were built to fit the shape of the wall.” As the description suggests, this school appears to have been the Pine Corners Schoolhouse or Blair School District, or Middlesex School District No. 1.

According to “Memories of the Rural Schools of Yates County, New York” by Jennie L. Hiler, the land title for the schoolhouse location – on Middlesex-Rushville Road (State Route 245) at the intersection with Loomis Road – dates to 1790 and a log building was built in 1796. Though Hiler states a frame structure known as the Poplar Schoolhouse was in use by the 1830s, she does not mention a cobblestone structure. She goes on to say an improved building was constructed in August 1889 according to S.N. Blair’s specifications.

In “America’s First Rushville,” Robert Elbridge Moody states the cobblestone schoolhouse at Pine Corners – a hamlet in the northeastern corner of Middlesex, situated on the outskirts of the present limits of the village of Rushville – was built around the same time as the Round Stone Schoolhouse was constructed in Potter. Indeed, he asserts the two schoolhouses were among the first cobblestone structures – houses or otherwise – constructed in the Rushville area. Unlike its cousin in Potter, though, the Pine Corners Schoolhouse “was given a very poor foundation,” Moody writes, “so bad that cracks in the walls made it dangerous and the building had to be torn down.”

According to a handwritten document from the subject files – possibly written by Hiler in the course of her research on rural schools – the Pine Corners Schoolhouse was the first school established in Middlesex. William Bassett started the school and served as its first teacher. The log schoolhouse was situated on a 504-acre farm that John Blair had bought in 1795; Blair gave the land for the site of the schoolhouse and also did many things to support the teachers and students. Indeed, Bassett later married Blair’s daughter Ann.

It was initially called the Poplar Schoolhouse, then the Round Schoolhouse during its time as a cobblestone structure, and finally the Pine Corners Schoolhouse. Typical of schoolhouses of the time, according to an article by Ruth Clark, it had a dirt floor, a fireplace for heat, benches made of split logs, and windows covered in paper rubbed in grease to make the paper transparent. The last record of Middlesex School District No. 1 is from 1929, and it seems students transferred to the nearby Rushville district at that point. Moody tells of children being transported to school in wagon and sleighs.

A newspaper item from the subject file, stamped October 12, 1944, states the Pine Corners Schoolhouse “has been unused since centralization,” a period that according to a timeline started in 1937 with district residents voting in favor of centralization and begun in 1938 with a new central school. The first six grades attended school in Middlesex, and the upper six grades went to Rushville. In 1939, the Middlesex Valley Central School opened. The schoolhouse was purchased by a man who intended to use it to store electric welding machines and household goods and planned to occupy it at some point.

Thus ended a nearly 150-year history of a schoolhouse in Middlesex, with a brief period within that timeframe as a second cobblestone schoolhouse in Yates County. According to the newspaper item, the property was to revert to the Blair family when the site was no longer used for a school. Indeed, it was Mrs. Elizabeth Blair, the oldest living member of the family, who completed the transfer.

[k12academics]

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[haitiankole]

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