This year marks the 10th Anniversary of the Indian Rock Schoohouse Association, and we have some fun things planned this year. You can check the calendar for future events, but for up-to-the-minute info check back here.

Please feel free to leave a comment whenever you visit.

Played on Saturday, August 11th at Maplebrook School’s field in Amenia, a great time was had by all 300+ baseball fans. The sun was hot and so were the players of the Roxbury(NY) Nine Living history team…winning the game by a score of 21-3 against the Hartford Senators.

If you missed the game, don’t miss the souvenir booklet created by Maureen Rooney of Rooney Design in Amenia. Finding as many old photos of Amenia baseball teams as possible, Maureen’s book and game program descriptions of 1890′s baseball will become the most popular local history document in recent memory. It is, at the very least, the most definitive view of life in a small New York State town since the Amenia Cookbook, her previous success.

The book is available for a mere $10 at Rooney Design (next to FreshTown). It is also available in Amenia at Havens Real Estate near the post office and in Millerton at Oblong Books. To order by mail write to IndianRockschool@aol.com for an order blank.
Cost by mail $15 which includes shipping and handling.

The Indian Rock committee, Joan Murphy, Maryellen Downey, Joyce Rebillard and Ann Linden found friends Shirley Gregory and Marion Reynolds among the party-goers. Shirley and Marion are formerly of Amenia, now residing at The Fountains. Many of the other participants introduced themselves -including Ivy, a young lady of 101 years.

Joella Knapp, coordinator of good times there, was in charge of the festivities.
Thanks for the swell time, Joella!

Happy 150th Birthday,
Indian Rock Schoolhouse!

On January 3rd the Amenia Lions Club helped the Schoolhouse Association celebrate at the first party of many birthday parties to be held during 2008. Although the little schoolhouse on Mygatt Road in Amenia marks its 150th birthday this year, the restoration began just 7 years ago.

The Lions Club was one of the first community groups back in 2001 to lend a hand in making the Indian Rock Schoolhouse the true living museum and community center it has become. The Lions have been important friends to the Association since the beginning. They helped with the first schoolyard cleanup, with the restoration, the schoolhouse picnics and events and donated the vintage flag which hangs in the schoolhouse today.

Lions Denise Clair(left)and Lee Bates(face hidden) try on old time sunbonnets much to the amusement of Jack Gregory and Allan Gamble.

At this first party of the 150th year, the Lions were brought up to date on the activities and the new Indian Rock outreach trunk show programs available year round. The celebration included dinner, the presentation of the trunk show “Visit to a One-Room Schoolhouse”, enthusiastic singing of “Happy Birthday, Indian Rock School” led by Lion Alan Gamble, and of course a birthday cake donated by Andrea and Cathy, owners of the Pines Restaurant in Wassaic where the party was held. Ann Linden and Mary Ellen Downey – long time schoolhouse volunteers – guided the Lions through the trunk show presentation.

This brilliant, stubborn, fascinating woman was not a teacher by profession (she was international buyer for the famed G. Fox & Co Gift Shop), but she was one of the best teachers I had. As long time president of the Kent Historical Society and Kent Town Historian, Emily took me under her wing after a chance conversation about Kent history while pulling weeds together at our Seven Hearths museum. At age 92, she still had energy and stamina! I began to volunteer for her one day a week, and was immediately in awe of her vast knowledge about our town and the local iron industry. I scribbled notes constantly, even on the back of my hand if no scrap of paper was handy. Hers was a nonstop history lecture.

Miss Hopson came from the large Kent Hopson family, and was a member of a generation that was primarily women. They were all well educated – Vassar, Wellesley and Smith – and all rabid historians. Emily’s mother, Elizabeth, also a Hopson by birth, had attended the Amenia Seminary and instilled a love of learning in her daughter. Emily fondly remembered childhood trips in a horse drawn buggy from Kent to Amenia to visit her mother’s friends and relatives (she was a Pratt descendant). The trip took all day, and Emily avidly absorbed the tales her Hopson parents told while they rode along.

Like most passionate students, Miss Hopson like to share her knowledge. She especially loved to teach children, though sometimes her detailed lectures went a little bit over their heads. Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather were iron masters and ran the Kent Iron Manufacturing Company. All the Hopson children learned the history of the industry down to the most minute detail. If Emily had one fault it was that she thought we all ought to be as interested in those details! But she also loved the history of education, and when the opportunity arose for the Kent Historical Society to acquire the pre-Revolutionary one-room schoolhouse on Skiff Mountain, she grabbed it. Putting her considerable energy, enthusiasm and financial wealth into the restoration project, she soon had an impeccably restored gem of a little building. And she finally had a classroom of her own!

Miss Hopson immediately developed a program for the 2nd and 3rd graders at Kent Center School – a program that we still use in part today. She collected old textbooks and composition books, and let the children actually use them. She gathered together graduates of many of Kent’s defunct one room schoolhouses at the Skiff Mountain School one day in order to collect their stories, so that he lessons would be accurate. She included a communal water bucket and dipper, as well as old lunch buckets and baskets, in her program, and generally held the kids spellbound as she told them about life in a one room schoolhouse. While the water dipper grossed out the children used to water fountains and plastic bottles, they were fascinated by the lesson plans, the stories and games that the kids “back in the day” used to play. Arithmetic bees were always a big hit. She continued to teach those classes until well into her 90s, and always had a spellbound audience.

As my teacher, Miss Emily Hopson and her lessons and memories still guide me through the programs that the Kent Historical Society holds for the Kent Center School students each year. I couldn’t do it without her! The best teacher ever.
by Marge Smith,
Director
Kent Historical Society

Benham writes, “Our farming district was lightly populated and had no village or other activities to attract people. The schoolhouse, I believe, would measure up quite well with the average one-room school in the state….I don’t know when the schoolhouse was built, but I do know that my father went there, and I remember hearing my grandfather speak of the ‘old school house’.”

“The Tower Hill School used wax candles on its Christmas trees.
It was Stanley’s job to stand by with a tin cup and a pail of water in case of fire.”

“About a week before Christmas the teacher and students went to a near-by woods and cut down a Christmas tree. It was taken in and set up in the corner of the classroom.
There were a few strings of tinsel in the cupboard and in the other corner, a half-dozen bright balls. There were also ten or twelve candleholders that would clip on the tree branches. The students were then asked to pop some corn at home, string some on a thread and bring it to school to hang on the tree.
There was a party in the afternoon of the last day before Christmas vacation. The mothers and any younger children came. Each student read or recited a Christmas poem. The teacher had put a small present under the tree for each student and the mothers brought cookies and candy.
The blinds, which were solid wood shutters, were closed and with a small torch on the end of a short pole, the teacher lit all the candles on the tree. The candles were watched while they were burning. We ate part of the goodies and then the shutters were opened and the candles were snuffed out. The coats, hats, boots and mittens were pulled on and all went home to enjoy the two-week vacation. As I think of it now, I have to wonder why we never burned the place down with all those candles among the flammable pine needles. The pail of (drinking) water averaged half-full and there was only a tin cup to dip and throw water.

…The children didn’t have a chance to tell a department store Santa Claus what to bring but anticipated his gifts. In the average family the stocking hung on the mantle probably held an orange or two, very likely the only ones of the year. There might be a small bag of homemade fudge and maybe some ribbon candy and a rubber ball. Under our tree there were small toys, occasionally a sled and always mittens and some other articles of clothing. I do not remember seeing adults exchange gifts at Christmas or birthdays.

…The decorations (for our tree at home) were carefully made for this special time.”
from Rural Life in the Hudson River Valley 1880-1920
Observations of Stanley H. Benham and photographs of Sidney S. Benham*
edited by Virginia Benham Augerson and Stanley H. Benham, Jr., Hudson Books, 2006
The book, a special Christmas gift, is available at Merritt Books in Millbrook and Oblong Books & Records in Millerton.

*note: The Benhams of Amenia are second cousins to the Tower Hill Benhams.