My far better half hails from the Borscht Belt of Sullivan County, New York, and spent her summers there during a slow but steady economic decline from its mid-century heyday as the booming resort capital of the Catskills.  Her maternal grandparents lived in Monticello, located in the Town of Thompson, and her grandfather was a fellow named Harold Francis Hoose, who was the last teacher at the village’s one-room Towner School.

Harold’s youngest daughter Mary Lee – my mother-in-law – recently learned that a consortium of residents, researchers and public officials in the town organized an effort to compile all the available history of its 20 one-room schools, which were districts unto themselves back in the day.  Led by Gordon & Henry MacAdam, this group took on the incredibly challenging process of memorializing each schoolhouse with an historical marker at every location, and built a great website detailing their unique stories to boot.

Mary Lee was born a few years after the schoolhouse closed and since she loves history as much as I do, we made sure to stop and pay our respects last time we were downstate visiting cousins.  Traffic is heavy on the exit (what a contrast it would be for her dad if were alive today!) and we were running late for a party, but I did manage to squeeze off this great shot – three generations of Hoose blood!

Born in 1906, Harold graduated from Schenectady’s Union College in 1929 and was a brilliant mathematician.  He spent much of his career as a well-known math teacher at Monticello High School until his retirement in the 1970’s, but it was at the little one-room schoolhouse called Towner where he learned the ropes.

This shouldn’t surprise the distinctly Anglo-Saxon Hooses, since their surname is derived directly from the Old English word “hus,” which means “house.”  It was at the dawn of the Middle Ages, when its first bearers were employed “at the house,” which in that era meant a religious house or convent. The name was first found in Britain, near Berkshire, where Harold’s ancestors likely resided well before the Norman Conquest.

The Towner Schoolhouse, on the other hand, was last found right here in the United States, many centuries later, just a few miles east of Monticello.  Situated along the old Newburgh-Cochecton Turnpike, the building sat near the top of a hill dropping down into Bridgeville and crossing the Neversink River.  At the end of the Roaring 20’s, when young Harold Hoose began his teaching career (a calling that his lovely granddaughter would also embrace one day), huge increases in state building and transportation aid prompted a steady growth in the number of school district centralizations.  But in more rural areas like Sullivan County, this process took much longer; Harold’s last year at Towner wouldn’t be until 1941.  In even more far-flung parts of the state, consolidation wouldn’t happen until the 1960s!

This was a job for men and women of rugged character.  Or maybe you just had to be more rugged in general back then.  The school day was much longer, and the teacher was equal parts educator, disciplinarian, janitor and groundskeeper.  Student ages could run anywhere from 5 years old to 15 (and sometimes older), so you really had to know how to work a room – you were teaching elementary and secondary levels at the same time!  You’d sashay between students reciting history or arithmetic in one corner and younger kids writing with slate and chalk in another, all while trying not to burn yourself on the cast iron stove.  If a crippling snowstorm, a washed-out bridge or planting season on the farm presented challenges, kids just didn’t show, and even though New York mandated attendance by law as early as 1874, good luck enforcing it.  If you fell ill or ran out of dry wood for that stove on a frigid winter morning, then the “Three Rs” just had to wait another day for the whole lot.

Conditions would soon improve, however, and when the Route 17 “Quickway” came through the Catskills in the 1950s, county leaders took the former school property by eminent domain.  Thanks to a NYSDOT project map from that era, researchers were able to pinpoint the school’s exact location, as well as where its woodshed and outhouses stood (yes, people still pooped outside in that era, into wooden holes no less).  If you stand in what is now the Exit 106 median between the on and off ramps of the Quickway today, you’re standing right where Harold Hoose once rang the bell to summon his charges to the day’s lessons.

The photo on the left is perhaps the only known photograph of the schoolhouse, courtesy John Masten from Wurtsboro, NY (and no, that’s not a real polar bear).  Next time we head down I’ll be looking for Chester Smith on Tappan Road, since he is quite possibly the last surviving student of the Towner School!  His house was moved to its present location during the Route 17 construction.  Until then!