HomeMy WebLinkAbout2081"Historical Report of ATHA SCHOOLHOUSE SCHOOL SECTION #16, 555 Concession
Road 8,Concession 7, Lot 30, City of Pickering,PIN 399,
March 2003
by John W. Sabean,Historical Consultant.
Atha Schoolhouse
School Section #16
555 Concession 8 Road
Concession 7, Lot 30
City of Pickering
PIN 399
Built in 1865; closed in 1966.
Converted to private home.
INTRODUCTION
In 1871, under the Free School Act, all public schools in the Province of Ontario were made
free for all children of school age.1 This was an important step in the development of education,
but it took three-quarters of a century to achieve it. The founding fathers were mindful of the
need for a good educational system and as early as 1798 the Executive Council of Upper
Canada recommended the establishment of grammar schools in certain towns, but these were
meant to serve only the privileged few. Even at that it was not until after the passage of the
Grammar Schools Act in 1807 that the first schools were founded.2
A broader measure was achieved under the Common Schools Act of 1816, which enabled
local citizens to build and operate a school under the direction of “discreet trustees.”
Where this occurred the government would contribute £10 towards the teacher’s salary.
The first school in Pickering Township to benefit from this provision was a school taught by
William Sleigh in 1822.3 This is the earliest documented school in Pickering Township,
although tradition says that schools had been in operation from before the outbreak of the War
of 1812.
The educational system in Ontario made a great leap forward when Egerton Ryerson was
appointed Superintendent of Education in 1844. Under his direction a series of school acts
beginning in 1846 gradually eliminated the haphazard inefficient school methods of the past.4
The Act of 1846, which came two years after Ryerson set out to inquire into the province’s
educational needs, bound the province to provide free education for all children up to the age
of sixteen.5
In 1844 George Barclay became the first superintendent (or inspector) of schools for Pickering
Township. He reported that Pickering had 15 school districts and 893 pupils (out of 1703
children in the township). Two years later the number of common schools in operation was
reported to be 21.6 This may have been a bit optimistic as reports for 1847, 1849, and 1851
reported only 18 (out of 21) active schools.7 The number of school sections fluctuated for a
number of years, but eventually ended with 17 and several union schools—with Whitby,
Uxbridge, and Scarborough—in addition.
The Illustrated Historical Atlas of Ontario County, which appeared in 1877, just after three
quarters of a century of settlement had been completed, provides a good summary of the
development of education in the county (and the country) to that date.8
[I]t may be well to put upon record some authentic facts of these olden times, as described by
the few ancients that still connect us with the primeval forest, and to revive those memories
which are fast becoming lost in the multiplied experiences and ever shifting panorama of these
modern days. There are people still living whose memory can carry them to the time when
there was not a school-house in the County of Ontario. There are many who can recollect when
school-houses were few and far between, when the machinery of education was of the rudest
description, and when the highest ambition of parents was that their children might be able to
read and write. There are hundreds who can remember when the literary attainments of the
teacher were gauged by his own appraisal of them; when an itinerant system of boarding
supplemented his scanty wage; when ‘healths five fathoms deep’ and mighty potations were
thought no discredit to him nor were supposed to obscure his mental vision nor mar his
usefulness; when a prime requisite for success in his work was not so much the ability to
impart knowledge as to inflict innumerable punishments of the most fantastic complexion for
the most trifling offences, and to subdue backwoods, lawlessness to some system of
transatlantic civilization.
In these primitive times the school-house was constructed of logs frequently unhewn,
and it contained but a single room. The furniture was of the rudest description,
consisting chiefly of long pieces of dea [teak?], supported by pins inserted in the wall, used for
desks, in front of which extended huge pieces of square timber supported by legs of uneven
length, whose unaccommodating imparity afforded more opportunities to the pupils of
determining the centre of gravity than practising the art of caligraphy [sic]. Utterly blank were
the walls, except indeed where some adventurous youth had carved his name, or with bold
design had traced in carbon the well-known visage of ‘the master.’ Maps, charts, and all the
other triumphs of Caxton’s art that now adorn the walls of the humblest school-house in the
land were then unknown, and we doubt not many middle-aged men and women can recall their
first impressions when they beheld, unrolled before their admiring gaze, a map of this stately
planet, which they heard for the first time had been bowling around the sun for thousands of
years. Like many dwelling-houses of the time, the school-house was heated by means of an
immense fire-place, upon whose ample hearth blazed tremendous logs cut from the adjacent
woods—a system that served the double purpose of heating and ventilation. Of fresh air,
indeed, there was no lack, for after a few years’ occupation this building disclosed many holes
and crevices through which wind or rain found an easy entrance, and through which the
youngsters, tired with their unaccustomed toil, might espy the progress of the world without.
Tradition tells that the first stove in any school-house in the county was made from an old
potash-kettle, two accidental holes—one in the bottom and the other in the side—suggesting
to some ingenious patron of learning the stoking-hole and the flue. Turned bottom up and
furnished with a chimney, what need to state that it became the admiration of all the
country-side. Rude and destitute of conveniences as these first school-houses were,
they nevertheless cost the early settlers much patient labour and no little self-sacrifice.
Often the burden of completing them fell upon two or three public-spirited men of the section,
and often too, extreme difficulty was experienced in raising sufficient means wherewith to pay
the teacher.
These striking memorials of backwoods times are fast disappearing, and giving place to
elegant and commodious structures which dot the landscape in every direction, and which
are no less the pride than the ornament of the whole country. May they all soon disappear,
and may not antiquarian zeal nor blighting parsimony prevent them being replaced by
school-houses more in accord with the progress of education and the necessities of the times!
Ryerson may have shaped the educational theory and the curriculum in Ontario, but it was his
deputy superintendent, a former student of Ryerson’s, J. George Hodgins, who was the
architect of these “elegant and commodious structures” that began to appear in the 1850s.
As Professor McIlwraith has written:9
If one person can be said to have shaped the landscape of public education in Ontario, it was
J. George Hodgins. As deputy superintendent of education from the 1850s until 1876,
deputy minister until 1890, and an inexhaustible promoter of literacy, he presided over the
period when compulsory, free public education took its place as one of the taken-for-granted
aspects of provincial life. Attractive, durable, functional schoolhouses were the centrepieces of
Hodgins’s policy. Hundreds are scattered across the province, readily identified by their
hall-like lines, roadside site, shade trees, and dated marker, frequently with the township name.
The Public School Act of 1846 bound the province to providing free education for all
children up to age sixteen. Buildings were to be designed for the purpose and spread across
the countryside for easy access. Qualified teachers, spinster or bachelor, were to board
inconspicuously in the neighbourhood; they would leave no trace. By 1863 there were nearly
four thousand public schools in Ontario, seven or eight buildings in every township south of the
Precambrian Shield. More than four out of five were wooden.
Hodgins’s great hope was that each building would be ‘the most attractive spot in the
neighbourhood.’ [J. George Hodgins, The School House: Its Architecture, External and Internal
Arrangements (Toronto: Province of Canada Department of Public Instruction, 1857), iii.]
His treatise, The School House, opens with more than thirty pages picturing showy school
buildings for the aspiring town or township….
Changes rapidly followed passage of the Free Schools Act and abolition of fees for primary
schooling in 1871. Three windows on each side became standard, and some schools had
separate entrances for boys and girls. Ventilation flues and raised ceilings improved air
circulation, and interior arrangements and equipment were upgraded…. [J. George Hodgins,
The School House: Its Architecture, External and Internal Arrangements (Toronto: Copp,
Clark and Company, 1876), 76.] Brick or stone country schoolhouses continue to be a highly
visible aspect of the general rebuilding in that era. Some were entirely new;
the best of the older ones were modernized and veneered, and still others were redesigned
surplus churches.
Despite this variety of origins, Hodgins worried about ‘such an uninteresting sameness’
among schoolhouses. [Hodgins, School House (1876), 10.] He urged that full attention be
given to architectural detail. Cambered, Romanesque, and flat-headed windows all were
widely used; end walls received gothic treatment. Vernacular forces and personal pride were
sufficiently strong that variation on the standard theme occurred naturally.
School grounds also came under Hodgins’s scrutiny. The 1876 manual prescribed that the lot
be one acre (0.4 ha), and certainly not less than half an acre, with the building centred from
side to side. [Hodgins, School House (1876), 21.] The site ought to be planted in species of
trees that the children could study. [Hodgins, School House (1857), 38, 40.] This practice
would help re-establish respect after generations of forest destruction. Sugar maple was
popular, and the centrepiece of many an Arbor Day ceremony in May. Huge,
mature specimens continue to shade school sites all over the province. Paling fences were
required, faced on the boys’ side of the play yard (boys pushed harder than girls).
A two-seat outhouse was similarly divided down the middle. A well and pump were mandatory.
[Hodgins, School House (1876), 21-2.]
BUILDING HISTORY: Atha Schoolhouse
The early history of School Section 16 was told by William Wood in 1911.
The history of School Section No. 16 (Atha) commences with the year 1841,
when a commodious plank schoolhouse was erected on the S.W. corner of Lot 32, Con. 8,
owned by Nathan Bentley. It was of the cottage roof pattern and was a very fine school in its
day. The internal arrangement was of the old fashioned type, a desk facing the wall nearly all
around the room at which the pupils sat on backless benches, while the smaller children were
accommodated without desks on benches which encircled the big box stove.
The school grounds are said to have been “composed of the King’s (Queen’s)
Highway and as much woods as the pupils wished to roam over.”
Among the earlier teachers were E. Wiseman, John Hand, John McEwen, Miss M. A. Collins,
Miss Jackson, William Bell, Daniel Koch, Louisa Starr and Charity Woodruff. In 1866 Patrick
Sherriff, who in earlier years had taught in Claremont and elsewhere in the township,
was in charge. There followed Miss H. Jarrett 1857, Thomas C. Smyth 1858,
James Churchill 1859, and then T. C. Smith from 1860 to the close of 1867.
During this period the new school was built and opened on January 1st, 1865.10
Patrick Sherriff had been a teacher in Claremont (SS #15) in 1847-1848. His time there was
not a pleasant one for the pupils, the parents, and the trustees. In March 1848, at a meeting of
the trustees it was
Resolved, That as the teacher Mr. P. Shirriff has not of late conducted himself entirely to the
satisfaction of Said Trustees—they will not sign the agreement prescribed by the Book of
Forms unless Mr. Shirriff will engage on his part to be more sober and attentive to his school
duties than formerly, and will be more cautious in using imprudent language to the children.11
Sherriff, however, did not mend his ways and was dismissed at a meeting held on 9 June.
It was found that ‘he was in the habitual practice of attending the tavern morning, noon, & night
and was often seen in a state of inebriation,’ he dismissed the children for days at a time,
he circulated false statements about the trustees, and had even ‘gone so far as to flourish his
fists in the Sec[retar]y’s face.’
Sherriff simply moved on to another school and another after that spending usually only a
year or so at each until he retired. While Sherriff was not typical of teachers in Pickering
Township he was of a type that trustees sometimes had to contend with.
Lillian Gauslin, writing in 1974, takes up the story of SS #16 where Wood left off.
In 1863, the site for a new school was purchased from Mr. George Harrison for two pounds
($10). The school was erected in 1864 and was opened January 1, 1865.
This same building continued to serve the school section from that day on.
The first teacher was T.C. Smith and the trustees who signed the deed for the new school were
William T. Mitchell and David B. Lehman. The Inspector was Mr. George Barclay.
In 1930 a basement was put under the school and a coal furnace installed —
since then a modern oil furnace has replaced the coal.
In 1964, Atha school celebrated its centennial. The chairman for the two day affair was
Mr. Norman Lehman. On Saturday, June 13, a program was arranged with Dr. M.B. Dymond
as guest speaker and other county and township officials contributing. Sports events and a
bountiful supper provided by the ladies of the section concluded the afternoon activities.
A variety program, with Cy Leonard as Master of Ceremonies, was held on Saturday evening.
At a church service held on Sunday, June 14, the Rev. A.D. Lehman was the guest speaker.
Over nine hundred people attended the centennial.
Atha, like other one-room schools in this area, closed its doors to education in 1966.
Mr. Arthur Latcham, of Stouffville, purchased the school and turned it over to the residents
of the area to be used as a community centre.12
Mrs. Thomas Dunkeld, whose family lived for many years in the Atha area, said that her
father went to the old 1841 plank school (although she mistakenly says it was built in 1811).
In all four generations of Dunkelds attended the two schools in Atha.13
LOT HISTORY: Lot 30, Concession 7
Mary Anne Fleming was the patentee of this lot in 1799. In 1818 she sold all 200 acres to
Albert Manuel. The next year Manuel took out a mortgage to Allan McLean for £75.
What became of Manuel after that is not known, but there is no discharge of mortgage
recorded and in 1843 McLean purchased the entire lot at a sheriff’s sale
(from Sheriff W.B. Jarvis). In 1850 McLean sold the west half to John Saunders,
and he immediately sold the northwest 50 acres to Daniel R. Koch. George Harrison
purchased the northernmost 40 acres from Koch in 1856, and in 1863 sold 1/4 acre in the
northwest corner to the Trustees of School Section #16.14
Notes:
1 Ontario, 34 Victoria, cap 33 (1871).
2 Upper Canada, 47 George III, cap 6 (1807).
3 Johnson (1973), p. 155, as cited from Colonial Advocate, 14 August 1828. In the previous y
ear Pickering had 334 children under 16 years of age, but no school qualified for the annual
grant. William Sleigh, a native of England, immigrated to Upper Canada about the year 1820.
In 1824 he purchased Lot 27, Concession 5 from William Baldwin. To that property he brought
his new bride (the wedding was in 1824 as well) Mary Major, a member of the Major family of
Majorville (later renamed Whitevale). In 1825 he served as township clerk. The Sleighs lived
on the south half of the lot, so his school would have been located a little east of where the
Whitevale school (SS #8) was later built. Abstract Index of Deeds; Beers (1877), p. ix; Walton
(1837); Wood (1911), p. 294 (Wood mistakenly locates him on Lot 28).
4 A couple of Acts predated Ryerson’s appointment: the Acts of 1841 and 1843,
Province of Canada, 4-5 Victoria, cap 18 (1841), and 7 Victoria, Cap 19 (1843).
The second provided for local superintendents to prepare reports and distribute money.
5 Province of Canada, 9 Victoria, cap 20 (1846).
6 Smith (1846), p. 82
7 Smith (1852), II, 43-44; [Ryerson] (1851).
8 Beers (1877), p. xi.
9 McIlwraith (1997), pp. 161-162.
10 Wood (1911), pp. 178-179.
11 No. 15 School Section Trustees Minute Book 1848[-1863] (Claremont), pp. 6-17.
12 Gauslin (1974), pp. 70-72.
13 Dunkeld (1947).
14 Abstract Index of Deeds.
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