A Brief Upper Burlington School History

The Upper Burlington School Building and School Life

The Upper Burlington School in 1940  (Note Privy at Lower Right)

Many one-room Nova Scotia schools like that in Upper Burlington were built in the decade succeeding passage of the Free Schools Act, just before and just after Confederation. As related in “The Little White Schoolhouse” (http://lwsm.ednet.ns.ca/oldendays.htm)  standard 25 x 36 plans were issued in 1864 by the provincial Superintendent of Education, Mr. Theodore Rand. These closely match the dimensions of the Upper Burlington building.

An earlier school built prior to 1850 was located about ¼ mile north of the present location at what in 1941 was the Vincent Burgess home.  The fire of 1850 destroyed that school and a replacement was built very near the present building. That replacement is the school most of the Harvie children, Mary Athalia (Smith) Fish and Willis Fish would have attended. The present building was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century, capacity 44 students in 22 double desks.

The activities of the Upper Burlington school in its early decades took prominent notice within the community as evidenced by the Upper Burlington notes of September 29, 1900 in “The Hants Journal”:

“On Tuesday last week Miss J.M. Allison, our popular and successful teacher, had a school picnic at Mill Brook in the locality…the afternoon was very pleasant and favorable so there were a goodly number present. The grounds were nicely fitted up for the occasion, and the delicious supper prepared by the kind mothers was all that could be desired. Consequently a good time was realized by everyone. Among the strangers present we noticed particularly Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Dill from North Andover, Mass., Miss Coretta Sanford from Belmont, and Miss A’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. E.T. Allison from Avondale.”

The Upper Burlington school operated until June of 1963, ending when Brooklyn Elementary opened, closing almost exactly 100 years after the Free Schools Act was introduced. In that century interval student numbers and grades taught fluctuated. Teachers offered grades P-11 until 1951, then P-9 only, and finally P-6 from 1957-63 when grades 7-12 moved to newly opened Hants West Rural High. The 1908 school picture shows 23 students. The 1935 picture shows 31. The count for 1953/54 was 51.

School Registers and the annual “Record of Free School Books” provide handwritten lists of names of teachers, students, their attendance by each halfday, textbooks borrowed, the teacher’s salary, the value of buildings and furniture, and other books held in the school’s “library”. Visits by the Inspector of Schools, the public health nurse, and other persons are also recorded. In 1948/49 names of two RCMP officers head the officials list.  The West Hants Historical Society holds registers for quite a few years of the Upper Burlington school. Their unchanged form that lasted for decades is remarkable evidence of either the stability of school administration in the province, or its stagnation, depending on one’s point of view.

In the early 1950s, the post-war baby boom pushed the student count in Upper Burlington over the old building’s capacity. For 1951 to 1958 a second school for P-4 only was operated in the old community hall (built in 1891 and removed about 1980) at the top of the hill a quarter mile away. After Hants West Rural High for grades 7-12 opened in 1957 the Upper Burlington grades were reduced to P-6 starting with the 1957/58 year. That would have reduced the teacher’s load, moving it from Prof Fletcher’s “impossibility” to something merely daunting.

Although in a modest building throughout its several decades of operation, with a woodburning stove in the centre of the room, separate outdoor privies for boys and girls, and a shared water bucket with single enamel dipper, the school provided many students with all their formal education. The late Canadian writer Alden Nowlan, who attended school in nearby Stanley at the start of WWII, gave a description of attending “the little white schoolhouse” in his short story, “About Memorials”. It could have easily passed for the school in Upper Burlington. The words spoken by his fictional teacher, Mrs. Phyllis Rhodenizer, could as well have been those of his real teacher, Stella (Rhodes) Smith of Scotch Village, “…those little white schoolhouses turned out some great people.” Stella’s younger sister, Phyllis Rhodes, taught in the Upper Burlington school in 1949/50.

The school building in Upper Burlington may have been basic, but for those who attended, it was the opening for their minds to the world. The degree of opening no doubt varied among its pupils, as did the effect on their teachers. Returning today one is struck by how small a facility it is, given the large impact schooling there had on its pupils’ lives. It sat very close to a farmer’s field on its south side and to the road on its east. A stride or two off the old doorstep shown in some school pictures and you were in the road. In later years at certain seasons dust from passing trucks and cars must have been a problem. Mostly horse and wagons, or horse and sleighs would have passed for all but the last two decades of operation.

The area on the east end where the washroom and kitchen are located today was a single large anteroom where coats were hung on a row of big hooks, and snow boots left to dry in winter. A large window on each of the north and south sides provided light in the entrance section. Doors on each end led into the schoolroom itself, a room about 24 x 28 in size. A single large outside door on the east end, visible in old school pictures, was the only entrance and exit from the building.

For all but the school's last decade the teacher's desk was located on a platform between the two doors, with a large blackboard behind it. Blackboards were also mounted on each of the other walls. This layout shifted in the last decade with the desk moving to the west end and the platform removed. Student desks faced toward that of the teacher.

Rough Sketch of Upper Burlington School Layout 1955-63

Notes: The building’s original layout from its construction in the latter half of the nineteenth century was changed when converted to community hall use late in the twentieth century. Several school pictures show the old steps and entrance when they were on the east end of the school adjacent the Old Walton Road. The original ten large windows have been replaced by a few smaller ones for heat conservation purposes. The ceiling was lowered and insulated. Water and septic were installed. The entrance area has been converted to kitchen and washroom use. Scorch marks still visible on the floor from spilled hot coals show where the stove had stood, warming scholars for several decades.

Rough Sketch of Upper Burlington School Original Layout

Above the blackboard in later years a large map of the world hung on the wall, each country a different color, with British possessions marked in red. Some pupils vividly recall the sponsor’s ad for chocolate bars on the lower part of those maps. Perhaps they inspired visits for some to the nearby store at noon hour.  A Union Jack usually hung on one wall of the school.

The middle of the room was occupied by the wood stove whose stovepipe to the chimney near the east end was suspended on wires attached to hooks on the ceiling 10 feet above. The attic section of the original brick chimney is still in place. The present lower ceiling was installed when the building was converted into a community hall several years after it ceased to be a schoolhouse. A new chimney was built on the west end for the furnace that was installed at that time. Prominent scorch marks still visible on the floor today, are from hot coals that very occasionally spilled out of the stove, and mark its former location.

The southeast corner of the schoolroom had a small sink where the communal water bucket sat. A water cooler replaced the bucket starting in the early 1940s. Two of the older pupils fetched the water from the well of a nearby home each morning.

The northeast corner of the room had a high cupboard, the school “library”, where a few spare textbooks were stored along with several dozen other books deemed appropriate for students. Total value of the library in the 1949 Register - $156.50.

Underneath the school at the west end was a small storage area for firewood with sloping dirt floor. Less than half a cord was stored, and replenished as needed. The entrance door is still there. In months when heat was required the student who was paid a few dollars monthly to be school janitor would carry an armload or two of wood daily to store in the coatroom area. From there 1-2 sticks at a time would be fetched for the fire.

Recollections of the school by many former pupils and teachers alike do not include feeling cold on the chilliest winter days, a testament perhaps to the heat radiating from the old stove, and the solid design and construction of the building itself. Of course memories on the topic may also be slipping.

The nature of the Upper Burlington school building, the daily school routine, and the method of local administration by community trustees, changed little for over 70 years from its opening. The most profound change in that period was probably a switch from slates and slate pencils to paper and pencil about the time of WWI. A teacher or student attending in 1885 would have been quite familiar with facilities and procedures in 1945.  Then in 1946 electricity was installed, the first intrusion of such technological change in the building’s history. Prior to that light for the schoolroom came from eight tall, wide windows, three on each of the north and south sides, and two on the west end. One imagines that on darker days especially in early winter it must have been quite dim inside by late afternoon.

A community-based fundraising effort paid the cost of installing electricity through pie sales and concerts. The Olgilvie Boys from Summerville participated in at least one such concert held in the old hall at the top of the hill. That hall had oil lamps for evening activities. It had been built in 1891, and served many other community functions in its time, including Baptist church services, and as a second school when a student population bubble in the 1950s outstripped the capacity of the main schoolhouse. Most years that hall was also the scene of the school Christmas concert. The annual bean supper held there each fall by the Community Club for many years is an event fondly recalled by those in the generation who attended.

After electricity was provided in the school another change quickly followed in 1949 when single desks were purchased to replace the larger of the old double seaters. The earlier desks were all the double-occupant type with fold-down seat, and came in two heights. The students attending in the fall of 1949 recall keen anticipation as they wondered whether they would be assigned one of the new ones.  When the student body was divided in 1951 the remainder of the double desks were moved to the second school and replaced with single student type.

A radical form of fundraising, dances in the recently electrified school, was included in the means used to pay for these new desks. Those students who were old enough to attend the dances recount some fairly obstreperous behaviour even by the standards of today, so it seems the dances were a short-lived attempt.

Minutes of Community Club meetings in the 1930s and ‘40s mention small annual donations ($5) to the school for the teacher to purchase equipment and supplies – a teakettle one year, a water dispenser another – and record effusive thank you notes from the teacher, grateful for any improvement to the minimal provisions. As one former teacher from the period said “In those days there was no money. Even $5 was a considerable sum”. 

Most such donations were raised from ice-cream sales at an annual August picnic held near the river on the property of Mrs Sydney Brightman at “The Oaks” about where the residence of Mr. & Mrs. Robbie Smith is located today (2008.) Pupils who attended in the 1930s and 1940s recall those as fun events that even the mosquitoes could not diminish. The Community Club minutes note an expenditure one year in the early 1940s of $.39 from a $.45 allotment for prizes at the picnic.

In the 1950s a radio was used in the school, whether a piece of school equipment or one provided by the teacher, to listen to a few special weekly school programs on the CBC. Such would have been unimaginable twenty years before that, especially since the CBC didn’t exist before 1935, and no radio broadcasts existed anywhere in North America before the mid-1920s.

It was not uncommon right up to the post WWII era for many pupils, especially the eldest boy or girl in the family, to be withdrawn after only a few years of education. They were needed to assist at home with younger siblings, or with outdoor work in the fields and woods. You didn’t get beyond grade 4 if chopping in the woods was deemed a higher priority for your time and strength. School pictures show few, if any, boys older than twelve. If anyone, boy or girl, wished to complete high school, they had to travel to the provincially supported county academy in Windsor, an expense that few could afford as it meant either boarding in Windsor for the school year, or daily trips on the train from Brooklyn. Provincial examinations for grades 10-12 challenged rural school students across the province.

Soldiers who served in WWI, WWII, and the Korean War are numbered among pupils from the Upper Burlington School, as are numerous farmers, woodsmen, teachers, nurses, secretaries, salesmen, homemakers, carpenters, truck drivers, sailors, and other occupations. A few students from the school’s latter days went on to obtain university degrees. No lawyers or politicians are known to have attended.

At the passing of the Free School Act in the second half of the 19^th century the area was largely one of farming and woods work. Few women worked outside the home. It was near one of Nova Scotia’s busiest industrial areas of wooden sailing ship boatyards operating from Avondale to Lower Burlington and beyond, where a few residents may have worked as ships carpenters. McAlpine’s Direcory of 1907/08 in the N.S. Archives lists “seaman” as another Upper Burlington occupation among the adults who would have been familiar to students then attending the school. That would most likely have been a crew position on a wooden sailing vessel, then in major decline. Quite a few people in adjacent communities had “seaman” or “mariner” as their listed occupation at the time.

At the closing of the school almost a century later the community consisted of a few remaining farms with many residents commuting daily on the greatly improved roads to jobs as far away as Halifax. It was even then unusual for a woman to work outside the home, a trend that started later in the decade and built to the more common double income homes of today.

At the time the school closed in 1963 it was not uncommon to see a team of draft horses passing, pulling a wagon in spring or fall, or a set of sleds in winter. Today not a single team of heavy draft horses is owned in the community. It is quite possible today that school age children in the community have never been in a horse drawn conveyance, a daily occurrence for students of an earlier era when almost every family had one or more horses.

Between the school’s founding and its closing the many different family names in the school Register reveal a regular turnover in the community population. Family names such as Fish, Harvie, Wolfe, Lake, Knowles, Wallace, Nelson, Shearer, MacDougall, Coleman, and Salter that were once well known in the community disappeared from the school lists as these families moved out and others moved in. The surnames of pupils in past school pictures are evidence of the changes.