“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 2)
During his last years of teaching at Philip’s Delight one-room school in Frederick County, Md., William McGill’s day began at 7 a.m. when he would get in the station wagon and drive up Catoctin Mountain on roads “so winding and narrow that he blows his horn constantly to warn the lumber wagons which frequently come the other way,” wrote William Stump for the Sun Magazine. The change in elevation was 1,500 feet over six miles of road. He would stop at the farms and cabins and pick up the older school children and then take them back down the mountain to Thurmont High School. Many of them were his former students so he would catch up with their lives and their studies during the trip. Once he dropped them off, he would turn around and head back up the mountain. Read more…
“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 1)
William McGill would have laughed at the idea that students need to be educated in $60-million-plus schools to get a good education. He would have known. For nearly a quarter century, he taught school in the last one-room school in Frederick County. “Some people are of the opinion that youngsters can’t get an education in a one-room school. That isn’t keeping with the facts,” McGill told the Sun Magazine in 1952. “Since 1910, I’ve been teaching in schools like this, and I wish I had a dollar for every one of my pupils who went to the university. Why, last year Betty Ann Willard, a girl I taught, was the honor graduate at Thurmont High.” Philip’s Delight Philip’s Delight School was located off an old lumber trail surrounded by thick woods high up on Catoctin Mountain. Before the school closed Read more…
Thurmont’s Seminary gave students an advanced education
At the beginning of July 1875, the parents and family members of 38 students of the Mechanicstown Male and Female Seminary gathered in Mechanics’ Hall for the first graduation from the school. “The stage was beautifully decorated and ornamented with flowers and evergreens, and everything looked charming as the children and young ladies, all dressed in white, were pyramidically situated upon it,” the Catoctin Clarion reported. The seminary had opened the year before by the Middle Conference of the Lutheran Synod of Maryland. It was located in the Stoner House on East Main Street. The Rev. Victor Miller was principal. The school’s prospectus said that “Its aim is to impart a better education, intellectual and moral, than is afforded by public schools—an education thorough in character and practical as possible.” The school taught three grades, though they don’t correspond to Read more…
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