13 - Common Schools - Sketches of the Village of Albion

COMMON SCHOOLS.

The Village of Albion comprises the main part of School District No. 1, in the, town of Barre. It has one board of Trustees, and three School Houses situated in different parts of the District, viz: A two story stone building on Bewer Street; one partly of stone and brick, one story high, on State Street; and one of wood, one story high, on Caroline Street. The first was built about 1835, the second in 1843, and the third in 1846. Generally, private schools for instruction of children, one or more, are in operation, beside the Academy and Seminary.

The whole number of pupils reported to draw public money, in January, 1853, in Albion, was 924. The number of volumes in the District Library is 925. District officers for the year 1853, are M. A. Harrington, John D. Kincaid, and N. Z. Sheldon, Trustees; Joshua Reynolds, Collector, and Dan H. Cole, Clerk.

These District Schools are kept in comfortable, well furnished buildings, by competent and able Teachers generally, open to all, where the children of those whose poverty prevents their assisting them otherwise to start in the business world, can have the advantage of instruction free. Yet numbers of these children grow up in ignorance beside the school houses, pests to the neighborhood in their youth, and candidates for infamy in after life, from which, perhaps, they might have been saved by sending them to school in youth. Many more of these truant children are found in all our large villages and cities, than rural districts afford, and many are growing up in Albion, without the benefit of its excellent schools, unless some legal enactment shall compel their guardians to send them there.

SOURCE:  Sketches of village of Albion : containing incidents of its history and progress, from its first settlement, and a statistical account of its trade, schools, societies, manufactures, &c. (1853); Arad Thomas; Albion, N.Y.