Says state owns Route 9D property
Fishkill has solved the mystery of who owns the property on Route 9D where a one-room schoolhouse educated children for 129 years before it closed and fell victim to a wrecking ball.
Town attorney Steve Gaba reported on Wednesday (May 7) that a title search uncovered a 1942 deed in which the Verplanck family transferred the land and structure to the state Department of Education.
The discovery is a milestone in a search Fishkill launched with the goal of taking over the property to preserve it as a memorial to the school, which opened in 1830 and closed in 1959, shifting students to the Beacon school district. Gaba and town officials initially believed the district owned the property but will now contact the state.
If the town gets ownership, one idea for the property is to build a replica of the school, Supervisor Ozzy Albra said in February. “The more attractions we have, the more we can celebrate our history,” he said.
Right now, that history is an empty lot at the southeast corner of Route 9D and Red School House Road. A sign installed at the property, along with the memories of former students, photos and news clippings, are all that remain of the Little Red Schoolhouse. At the time it closed, when its veteran teacher retired in 1959, the one-room structure had seven grades — “pre-first” to six.
The school’s history began with its construction in 1830 on property owned by the Verplanck family, large landholders who also donated the property for Stony Kill Farm, which sits across Route 9D. Elizabeth Travis, a Glenham native and Beacon High School graduate, taught there for 47 years, from 1912 until it closed. She would call one class at a time to a front bench.
“When she was doing a lesson with one grade, we had to be quiet and do our studies,” said Maryanne Cavaccini, a Fishkill resident known as Maryanne Greggo when she attended the school.
Cavaccini entered as a kindergarten student in 1956, when the Little Red Schoolhouse may have been the only one-room school left in Dutchess County. Her brother Frank also attended the school, which drew students who lived in Baxtertown and on Red Schoolhouse and Stony Kill roads and Route 9D.
Sitting in the I-84 Diner in February, Cavaccini recalled the DeSoto that her teacher drove, the potbelly stove that provided heat and a swing students hung to fling themselves into a pond. One newspaper account credited Travis with saving the structure from a fire by organizing a bucket brigade of students that extended to a nearby stream.
A truck filled with candy once overturned outside the school, said Cavaccini, spilling its contents and drawing students outside. “We were screaming, ‘We got the candy,’ ” she said. “The teacher came out screaming, ‘You can’t do that.’ Well, we did it.”
When the school closed, Cavaccini was about to enter the third grade. She transferred to South Avenue Elementary and later graduated from Beacon High School. The Little Red Schoolhouse was demolished in 1971.
Five years later, Travis attended a ceremony marking the installation of a sign made by students at Glenham Elementary School in Fishkill, which is part of the Beacon district. She died in 1984 at Highland Hospital in Beacon.
It’s great to see that we finally found an owner. It took about four years to do that. After the town started it, I took it over. I hired the lawyers from Queen City abstract, which they said they found who owned it, which they probably didn’t. Then I asked Eric over at Stony Hill Farms to look into it, and he exhausted all his means before he left. But now I’ve been maintaining the property. We knocked all the brush down. We mowed the lawn every couple of weeks. The town did some. I’m the one who put the signs up, had it made personally and hopefully, with the town’s blessing, we’ll put another little schoolhouse up and get it rocking and rolling.
I am glad to hear that the Town of Fishkill is planning to conserve a part of American education history. Rural schools were a big part of the education process for many years.
I taught in a one-room school in northern Vermont — grades 7 and 8 — from 1968 to 1979. Our town had four schools, still in operation. The directors, along with the superintendent, were having a hard time getting teachers for grades 1 to 8, so they put two grades in each schoolhouse. That lasted until 1995. When I started teaching, I boarded with one of the directors and was the last teacher to board out.