Antique maps shed light on U.S., local history
Malecki recalls one-room school days
SOUTH GLENS FALLS, N.Y. >> Stan Malecki can’t help marveling at how far public education has come since his childhood days attending the one-room No. 8 School at the corner of Vischer Ferry and Clifton Park Center roads.
There were only two dozen or so kids in grades one through eight, barely enough to fill one classroom in today’s Shenendehowa Central School District, numbering 9,800 students.
Malecki, 77, started out as a first-grader in 1946.
“They didn’t have kindergarten,” he said. “Little kids in the younger grades sat in front. Biggers kids in higher grades sat in the back. We had one teacher, Eleanor Witherill. She was like an orchestra leader. She had all of those things going at the same time. That’s what made me decide to become a teacher.”
Students in grades eight to 12 moved into Shen’s main new building in 1953. Malecki graduated in 1958 and earned his teaching degree at Oneonta State before going on to a 35year career at Jackson Heights Elementary School in Glens Falls.
Starting salary? $4,100 per year!
But working with young people is a lifelong love and passion, and he’s still doing it as a volunteer for the Historical Society of Moreau and South Glens Falls, which recently opened a new exhibit of antique maps, the kind found in school classrooms a century or more ago.
A set of four large United States maps, ranging from 184756, shows the progression of Western growth and expansion
in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War.
Two others depict New York state, while there’s one each for Saratoga County and South Glens Falls.
“This was the AV (audiovisual) of the time,” Malecki said.
One of the most artistic maps shows all of New York state, surrounded by engravings of landmarks and natural attractions such as the Genesee River falls in downtown Rochester. Published by Robert Pearsall Smith, in 1860, it was made from new and original surveys under the direction of J.H. French, a civil engineer.
Each map is accompanied by a brief historical overview, telling major events from the year it was published. In 1860, for example, James Buchanan was president, but Abraham Lincoln was elected in November.
The Saratoga County map, from 1856, includes images of “The New Union Hall in Saratoga Springs” and the stately homes of prominent area residents in the Spa City, Ballston Spa, and Stillwater.
The Historical Society is based at Parks-Bentley Place in South Glens Falls. One section of the house is an original 1760 log cabin with beehive fireplace.
School groups visit regularly for programs ranging from the Underground Railroad to ways in which people gathered, prepared and preserved food in the 1800s. The property includes a 19th-century summer kitchen and a one-room schoolhouse, similar to the one Malecki attended, which produced some of his fondest memories.
“We had a record player,” he said. “If it was a rainy day and we couldn’t go outside, the teacher would put on a 78 record with march music and we would march up and down the aisles. That was gym. We had recess every morning. In winter, a corner of the playground froze over so we’d all bring our skates to school and skate on the pond during recess.”
“And we always went to school on Labor Day, but we went with rakes and shovels and cleaned the playground. Labor Day was a work day. A lot of kids were farm kids. They had to help with milking before they came to school,” he said.
A Christmas pageant was held each year based on the Christ child’s birth in Bethlehem.
“I was a king one year and a shepherd another year,” Malecki said. “We had no hall. It was just a one-room school, so we had to march up the hill to the Baptist Church because they had a room we could use.”
Halloween always turned out to be most “upsetting” time because the school had no indoor plumbing.
“There were two outhouses, one for the boys, one for the girls and on Halloween teenagers from the neighborhood would tip over the outhouses,” Malecki said laughing. “The morning after, men from the town garage next door would come and set them back up.”
For drinking water, a woman who lived next door would bring a pail of water to the school each morning and dump it into a big ceramic crock with a spigot on it.
“Paper cups were made out of wax paper, and they were folded. On hot days, if you held it next to your mouth and blew into it, it puffed up. So big kids got more water and little kids might not have gotten any,” Malecki said.
“Everybody went home for lunch,” he said. “There was no such thing as hot lunch and no such thing as a snow day. I remember one time on a terribly snowy day, my sister and I — it was 10:30 in the morning — we were all freezing outside the school, so we went home. The next day we got yelled at by the teacher because she arrived at 11:30 and we weren’t there!”
Conditions might seem crude by modern standards, but the education kids got was first rate nonetheless, Malecki said.
“There were four kids in my grade level, all boys. There was no social promotion. You moved to the next grade when you finished the work,” he said. “In first grade, you heard the second-grade lessons. In second grade, you heard the third-grade lessons. So by the time you got to sixth grade you were pretty well entrenched with that work.”
“The main thing is because we were in the country, it was a tight-knit community,” Malecki said. “If anybody needed something, everybody was right there.”
Parks-Bentley Place, located at 53 Ferry Blvd. in South Glens Falls, is open from 1-4 p.m. Saturdays and at other times for groups of 10 or more by appointment.
The exhibit of antique maps will be up through July 4.
Other upcoming events are a plant sale on Saturday, June 8 and the annual Flag Day Celebration on Sunday, June 9 as well as children’s programs in July and August.
For information, call 518-636-3856, email: purinton73@gmail.com or go to www.parksbentleyplace.org.