History of
Cambridge Schools

Part One

The history of the Cambridge schools mirrors the tumultuous and cantankerous history of the village

Ken Gottry started this research project to learn more about the 1947 suspicious fire that destroyed the Cambridge Union School shortly after a hotly contested vote defeated the creation of a new centralized school district.

Investigating the history of anything related to Cambridge starts with understanding how the towns and villages were formed, reformed, and finally consolidated. This is especially true when researching the history of the Cambridge schools.

In this segment of the report Ken covers 1799 to 1927. He describes how the East End and West End of the village maintained two school systems for 100 years until 1891.

Presentation

Part Two

This part starts with the Central School Act of 1927. Ken was going to move on to the suspicious fire that destroyed the Cambridge School in 1947, but once again he got sidetracked.

Instead he goes back to the riotous 1873 debate about merging the East and West Districts into a single school district. He touched on this in Part One, but after reading Dave Thornton’s humorous details of that year he just had to include more.

He wraps up this part of his research with material about the 30-plus one-room schoolhouses in the 3 local towns.

Read or Download

On July 20, 2005 Ken gave a slide presentation covering Part One and Part Two plus many more maps and photos .

Read Part One    as a web page or download Part One  as a PDF.

Read Part Two   as a web page or download Part Two    as a PDF.

View Presentation   as a web page or download Presentation    as a PDF (caution: this file is over 4MB and will take a long time to download).