My Valley
The
little old stone school house stood not far from White Lake and was probably the oldest
school in the county. I wish it were still standing but when the first hard road was put
through the old stones were torn down and ground up for road ballast. It seems too bad for
it would have been a most interesting piece of antiquity to preserve. My aunt Mary
Tillotson went to school there at the age of four and she told me how the school looked
inside. It was heated by a large fireplace and the teacher's desk was at one side of this,
opposite the door, the pupils' desks were ranged continuously around the edge of the room
and they sat on slabs, round side up supported by strong wooden legs (slabs by the way
were the outside strip sawed from logs, usually four to a log, and considered waste
lumber). The children sat with their faces to the wall, their backs. to the teacher. At
this time Aunt Mary must have walked a long distance over a lonely road. She told me that
the teacher was Emily Callbreath and I have heard it said that even before that, Aunt
Mary's own mother, as Elvira Hard, my grandmother Gillespie, had previously taught this
school. Even tho' the old building has not been preserved to posterity, a painting is now
in the possession of Alfred Gillespie of Bethel, N.Y.
Another famous Sullivan County school gone almost before my time was the Mongaup Valley Academy taught many years by one Reuben Fraser of Scotch ancestry, a member of the Covenanter church of White Lake, much beloved and highly respected. Here school "was kept" in the community building known as Eureka Hall. Here, the growing boys and girls, young men and women from all over the county must have received the best part of their education except for a few whose fathers could afford to send them to college. Wynkoop Kiersted was one of these and Will Waddell from White Lake as well as Dick Gillespie from the same place. Will Haley, a poor boy attended the Academy but he had to depend on his own resources to pay his school bills for this was a private school. One day he told Mr. Fraser of his intention to go work on the Erie canal to earn money for his schooling come next winter. "No, Will, I wouldn't do that," replied his teacher, "You will be thrown among all kinds of vicious people who may have a bad effect on you." "No they won't," replied Will, "if I want to be a bad boy I can be one in Mongaup Valley as well as anywhere else. I need the money and I can get good wages on the canal. I need every penny." So Will went on to drive a mule on the tow path, and kept this up as long as he needed to. In the end he became one of the best teachers in Sullivan Co.- became Principal of Monticello high school where he moved his mother and her family to live with him thus insuring an education for his brothers and sisters. In later years he gave up teaching and got a job in the port of customs at New York.
The other boys who were Reuben Fraser's pupils and who all I knew turned out well, were: Will Waddell who graduated Civil Engineer from Union, later turned missionary, and went to South America where he lived and died, his children following his work after him. I can truly say of the others that they were most successful in their chosen fields as well. Milton Kerr was probably a pupil of Reuben Fraser but of this I am not sure. I only wish the Academy had been operating in my day but those who came after Reuben did not make a success of it as he had done so it did not pay probably. Perhaps the population of the Valley was dwindling. Two other names come to me now as an afterthought. Will Brundage who became first a Methodist minister, later became affiliated with the Unitarians; and Willis Purdy, the Doctor's son who himself became a member of the medical profession. Others whom I neglected to mention were Wynkoop Kiersted, Jr. and Dick Gillespie, the old Doctor's grandson both of whom later graduated C.E. from Union College at Schenectady.
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