The Factory School: Notes on the Social Reproduction of Wilderness Workers with Eliza J. Darling

Monday, October 16th, 6pm

What is a rural education for? In modern, urbanized America, it often seems as though we educate rural children in order to send them away to find a better life, a growing challenge in the face of the forces which have rapidly transformed the countryside over the course of the past fifty years: rural flight, rural aging, rural restructuring and rural gentrification. Today, rural schools are in decline. But as the settler colonial project of the nascent United States spread across the interior frontier of the Adirondack wilderness in the wake of the American Revolution, schools took root and rapidly proliferated, suggesting a very different perspective on the future of the Adirondack communities and the role of the rural school in their development. This talk will consider the relationship between rural schools, the rural economy and rural hope through three surviving artifacts of nineteenth-century Bleecker Village: the District 3 Schoolhouse, or “Factory School,” built in 1873, the District 3 book of minutes, covering trustee meetings from 1853-1969, and The Autobiography of Hannah Green Streeter, the remarkable memoir of one of the school’s most notable teachers. Presented by Dr. Eliza J. Darling.

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Fulton County Historical Society programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.