Educating their children in a schoolhouse setting was not a priority for Warren’s pioneer settlers.

The family, then usually much larger than today (10 or more children was not unusual), was the center of instruction. It was in the household, through the daily activities of family life, work and worship, that children received basic instruction in religion, moral values and occupational skills. In an area where schools were unavailable or difficult to reach, the family was the place where youngsters learned the rudiments of reading, writing and ciphering. If the parent was unable to provide such instruction, children might be sent to a neighboring family to be taught. Sometimes for a small fee, a local housewife would teach her own and neighboring children in her kitchen as she went about her household tasks, keeping what was then called a “dame school.”

During the first 100 years of settlement, the only record of a school in Warren Township is the appearance on a Revolutionary War era map of a schoolhouse on Mount Bethel Road near its intersection with Mount Horeb Road. Tradition has it that the stone Smalleytown School was built in 1803 to accommodate the numerous progeny of the Smalley and Moore families who lived in the neighborhood, but written records are lacking. Until 1828, when $50 was voted for the education of poor children, township records contain no reference to any school or teacher.

   On March 3, 1828, the State Legislature took New Jersey’s first faltering step toward creating a system of public schools, authorizing townships “to vote, grant and raise…such sum of money…for the erection and repairing of one or more public school houses, or for the establishment of free schools…” and appropriating $16,000 to match local moneys. In response, on April 13, 1829, Warren Township voters agreed to raise $86 to match $100 received from the state. Dr. John W. Craig, Lefford Waldron, Jr., Squire Terrill, Freeman Cole and Elam Genung were chosen as the town’s first School Committee.

The following year the township was divided into nine (later raised to 11, one of them joint with New Providence) school districts. Annual amounts voted in support of the schools ranged from $1 (when there was a surplus) to $800. Five schoolhouses are mentioned in the early records – Round Top, Union Village, the Stone School House and ones “near” Edward FitzRandolph and James Vail (the latter two in what would later become Green Brook and North Plainfield) – with an enrollment of 420 students in 1835. Curiously, the 1840 Federal Census counted only four schools and 85 students, probably a reflection of actual attendance.

After 1847 State law required a township Superintendent of Schools in place of the previous School Committee. Daniel Cory filled the office until 1853. Successors until 1866 when the office was abolished were Lefford Waldron, Dr. Craig, David Coon and George C. Owen. All of Warren’s schoolhouses were one-room affairs with students  ranging in age from four to 17 taught by one teacher. In such an environment, discipline was both necessary and frequently corporal. In 1836 12-year-old Elizabeth Alward’s parents filed a civil complaint against her teacher, Lewis Conant, for assault and battery. “On Saturday, the 27th day of February, 1836, she was at school at the schoolhouse at Mount Bethel,” testified Elizabeth. “The teacher, Lewis Conant, told Benjamin Corrington to go and get six whips which he did; most of them four feet long and some longer. As soon as the boy went out for the whips, Lewis Conant began whipping her with a whip he had in the house. When the boy came into the house, he took another whip and she thinks he used about three of the whips on her. While he was whipping her she thinks Harvey Bird told him that he had struck her one hundred times; Conant replied that he had just begun, and continued on whipping her. He whipped her long after Bird spoke to him, more than he had done before.”

Some teachers were incompetent, others dedicated, but all struggled in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. “[Because of] the very low salary paid in some districts, or from other causes, we find teachers incompetent to maintain order or impart instruction,” wrote one observer in 1864, “so that in passing through our county we find as many poor teachers as we do unsuitable school houses, both so bad we cannot discern which is worse….”

Poor facilities, bad teachers and sporadic attendance plagued the system for years. Since parents had to pay tuition when the township’s miserly appropriation and state funds were exhausted, poor parents kept their children home for much of the year. “The schools in the township are at present in a fair condition, but I regret to say that there is less interest manifested by the parents in availing themselves of the opportunities for educating their children than there should be,” complained Superintendent Coon in 1860. “Some districts propose to vacate the schools for a time…, not willing to be taxed to keep them open during the whole year…. I wish that some plan might be devised to make the schools free.” Warren continued to charge tuition, when needed, until 1871 when state law mandated that all public schools be taxpayer supported.

By the turn of the century there were six public one-room schoolhouses in Warren – Warrenville, a stone building erected in 1847, Springdale, built 1867, Round Top, 1897, Mountain View, 1876, Mount Bethel and South Stirling, 1894. Nine school trustees, three elected each year for three-year terms, governed the six school districts. Teacher salaries were modest: Lillian M. Conroy, hired to teach at Springdale School in September 1901, received a salary of $350 paid in 10 equal installments. Grange Hall, a building that dates to 1865, was rented for 6th and 7th grade classes when the one-room schoolhouses became too crowded. Eighth grade pupils and the few who went on to high school were sent to North Plainfield on tuition.

As a rule the younger students walked to school, often a trek of several miles along rutted and muddy country roads. Those going to North Plainfield were more fortunate, transported by a horse drawn school bus run by the Rev. George Bowers. “I would have to be at the Mount Bethel Church corner by seven o’clock in the morning where either Rev. Bowers or his daughter, Maud, would meet me with the team,” recalled Elizabeth Schumacher, a 1918 North Plainfield High School graduate, many years later. “Some students got on there, others at Kirch’s Corner, while the ones from Coontown were picked up down the road.” After letting his passengers off at the high school, Bowers parked his rig at Blimm’s Hotel, then began the return trip at 2pm. “As I look back on those days, I remember them as a very pleasant experience. Some days the weather was good. When it rained we would roll the curtains down and keep on going. The horses didn’t mind the thunderstorms. The one thing the horses didn’t like was the whistle and the noise when we passed the stone crusher at work on the roads.”

After holding steady at about 1,100 between 1890 and 1920, Warren’s population surged to nearly 1,400 by 1930, a jump of 30%. The resulting press of children soon taxed the capacity of the town’s 19th century one-room schoolhouses to their limit. Bernadine Nuse, the teacher at South Stirling School, was outspoken in her complaints, on one occasion reporting to her supervisor that she had 48 children enrolled but only 29 seats. Ms. Nuse joined other teachers and parents who regularly pointed to polluted drinking water, overflowing outhouses, inadequate heat and insufficient ventilation. County and state school officials who investigated Warren’s six schoolhouses in the l920s agreed that none of the buildings should be used for school purposes.

Nothing was done about the situation, however, until a threatened cut-off of state school aid, then nearly $10,000 annually, jolted Warren out of its apathy. The Warren Township Civic Association, joining the battle for reform in 1929, mounted a successful campaign in 1930 that saw its three candidates for the School Board victorious in a hotly contested election. After forces led by Tax Collector Edward Schult Sr., an advocate of the one-room schoolhouse, were routed, the new School Board began planning for the eight-room centralized school recommended by the State Department of Public Instruction. Undaunted by defeat, voters led by Schult complained of the cost of the proposed school, others opposed its location in Mount Bethel and a third group held out for two four-room schools on opposite ends of the town. “Don’t let the Civic Association put a mortgage on your home…,” wrote Schult, president of the Republican Club and a notorious penny-pincher.  “God knows taxes are high enough now, with nothing to show for them.” Looming in the background of the furious debate was the Great Depression, which had struck the nation two years earlier. Opponents of the centralized school claimed it was the height of folly to indulge in the luxury of a new school at a time when the School Board had barely enough money to meet its payroll.

The year 1931 saw five school referendums on three different building sites, each of them defeated. Only after a massive effort by the proponents of a central school was the sixth referendum approved by a margin of 311 to 267. A construction bond issue of $78,750, an enormous sum at a time when the average family paid taxes of some $60 per year, also won approval. “This Saturday’s affair will mark the first step in the realization of a dream long cherished…,” wrote The Somerset Advocate when Central School’s cornerstone was laid on July 23, 1932. “Years have passed since the plan to replace the community’s six one-room schools with a modern and efficient central building was originally proposed. The campaign in behalf of this monument of progress has been long and difficult, and often bitter. Politics was involved. Sectionalism played no small part in the dissension. Even personalities were concerned in the argument.” Proponents were ultimately successful because, added the paper, they felt “the children of the community had suffered long enough with the uncomfortable and unsanitary relics that were serving as schoolhouses.”

Dedicated in February 1934 (the first class actually graduated in June 1933), Central School remained Warren’s chief monument to civic virtue until post World War II population growth brought a new crop of youngsters into the school system. Overcrowding at Central School forced the Board of Education to turn to alternate facilities, including Our Lady of the Mount’s parish hall, until 1953 when the town’s second school, Woodland, opened on the east side of town. With some 300 children attending makeshift classrooms in several churches and the Washington Valley Fire House, pressures mounted for a third school. After a long battle, Washington Valley School opened in 1959, followed by Mount Horeb in 1966 and Middle School in 1972. Declining enrollments in the l970s and l980s mandated closure of Woodland and Washington Valley (wisely, the Board of Education resisted pressure to sell both schools). In recent years, as the school age population began to climb once again, both schools were reopened and all have been renovated and enlarged, ready for an enrollment of more than 2,400 students.

©   Warren Township Historical Society