Education for Everyone: Connecting Morristown’s dots and dashes in an historic struggle

Maple Avenue School c. 1870, showing students and original teachers. NJHGC Photograph and Image Collection
Maple Avenue School c. 1870, showing students and original teachers. NJHGC Photograph and Image Collection
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By Margret Brady

People of a certain age may remember the landmark 1971 case, Jenkins vs. the Board of Education, which empowered the commissioner of education to compel Morris Township to merge its schools with Morristown’s to form the Morris School District.

It’s worked out pretty well:

“The Morris School District remains racially, ethnically and socio-economically diverse 45 years later,” according to Paul L. Tractenberg, a distinguished public service professor of law at Rutgers­ Newark.

But this was not the first educational battle fought here.

Maple Avenue School c. 1870, showing students and original teachers. NJHGC Photograph and Image Collection
Maple Avenue School c. 1870, showing students and original teachers. NJHGC Photograph and Image Collection

One hundred years prior to the Jenkins ruling, in 1871, the Maple Avenue Public School opened its doors, for grades 1 through 12.

The struggle to offer all Morristown children a free education, begun in the 1850s, finally had resulted in providing all residents with the finest free education available in the state.

Its supporters had continued their efforts through financial panics, the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. The opening of this school was a proud moment indeed for Morristown, starting a long tradition of educational excellence.

FROM SLAVE OWNER TO VISIONARY

A prime mover in this achievement was George Vail. He had grown up in a family that owned slaves and had many indentured servants. Like many of its neighbors, the Vail family was dependent on those slaves and servants to maintain its large estate, farm, and industrial complex on Speedwell Avenue.

Damming the Whippany River to create Speedwell Lake made it possible to use water power to run the equipment in the many factories at Speedwell. None of this would have been possible without slave labor.

George’s father, Stephen Vail, and many of his contemporaries considered his slaves as property. They had been purchased, just like the land, cattle and equipment they owned.

Stephen was a hard taskmaster, who did not hesitate to take whatever measures he thought necessary to maintain order. He continued to purchase slaves, and offer rewards for their return when they escaped, as long as the New Jersey law permitted slavery.

Prior to the Civil War, most elected officials had occupations that today would be considered white-collar jobs.

George Vail
George Vail went from slave owner to educational visionary

But George, a congressman, had a unique talent that enabled him to invent new forms, with hot molten iron. These inventions made him a wealthy man. His political detractors belittled the fact that he continued to spend time working at the forge.

George’s work required the use of assistants. Those assistants often were slaves, and indentured servants, as young as 7 years old.

Working with hot molten metal, as he did, was a very dangerous endeavor but no one else had the ability to manipulate the metal like George Vail.

So he continued to work at the forge, relying on the ability and skill of his assistants to keep him safe. His life was in their hands. Any error or misstep on their part could cost him his life. He depended on them — and learned to respect them. Without their intellect and abilities he could not have created the inventions behind his success.

Augustus Cutler was his sister Sarah’s brother-­in­-law and George’s neighbor. As the leading Democrats in Morristown, they became close allies.

When Cutler began his attempt to provide a free public education for all residents, George and his brother Alfred supported his efforts. A huge religious revival had led many, including George, Alfred and Augustus, to believe that all men were equally entitled to share in the beauty and benefits of God’s creation. This included the right to be educated and improve one’s condition in life.

SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

By 1843, George had been exposed to the theories of sustainable design circulating in England, and now being taught by Samuel Morse and outlined in Andrew Jackson Downing’s best-selling publications on landscaping and design.

This led him to expand his vision for the new home he planned to build, and for his property and the community at large. He believed that quality buildings and beautiful surroundings should not simply benefit the owner, but should be encouraged and shared with the entire community, rich and poor alike. This included parks, buildings and public schools.

The slave issue had splintered the Democratic party. George and Augustus were part of the faction that supported freedom for the slaves. But unlike many others, who only focused on freedom for the slaves, the Vail brothers and Cutler had the foresight to be concerned that without an education, the slaves and poor never would improve their lot in life.

An 1817 law had created funding for public schools, but it had little impact in Morristown. When those funds finally were released a decade later, the amount Morristown received was inadequate to provide for five schools in the then-existing separate districts.

Most wealthy families sent their children to private schools and were not concerned. They felt the poor, especially slaves, were not capable of learning much anyway. Even after a series of articles describing the deplorable conditions and inadequacies of the public schools appeared in the local papers in 1850, nothing was done.

George and Augustus continued their efforts. They had the insight and political savvy to know that to attract decent teachers, they needed a school that was well equipped for educational purposes. Until such a school was built, former slaves and the poor never could achieve the level of education necessary to better themselves.

In 1853 the men joined forces with fellow Democrats George Cobb and Mayor Theodore Randolph, the former governor of New Jersey.

Their efforts eventually led to the separation of the Town and the Township in 1865. New Jersey was in a state of post-Civil War turmoil, and the split only was finalized after a long, hard struggle.

It took several attempts to get the necessary legislation passed, according to records on file in the local history department of the Morristown & ­Township Library.

GOODNIGHT, LADIES

George Cobb was elected Morristown’s first mayor. He joined with Augustus Cutler and George Vail to convince voters to support a new public school, but their efforts were thwarted by a group of local property owners.

They announced they had raised funds privately to build what was promised to be a fine new public school. Construction had begun near the intersection of South Street and Madison Avenue. The new structure was designed by the popular architect Samuel Sloan.It was a fine school indeed.

Parents of potential students were shocked to learn, when the school was ready to open, that the new Morris Female Academy would not accept males, and would be charging the highest tuition in town.

This so angered many of the working class citizens, who had supported their wealthy clients in opposing the use of tax dollars for a new school, that they now voted in favor of the new public school.

That school would be built on Maple Avenue land that had been donated by Mayor Cobb. The design of that new school, as described by John Cunningham in his book, Youth’s Bright Days, was a bigger and better version of the new Morris Female Academy.

The Board of Education, led by Augustus Cutler, decided to focus on building just one new school of the best quality and design possible. The separate districts then were combined into one.  The men envisioned creating the state’s finest public high school.

There still were very few high Schools in New Jersey. Quietly, Morristown’s plans were expanded to include sufficient classrooms and teachers to serve grades 1 through 12.

However, most of the poorer students lacked the basic skills to enter High School. The Board of Education was not prepared to undertake construction of more than one school, even though another grade school was needed desperately in the poor section of town.

Once again, George Cobb found a solution. He encouraged his Methodist congregation to move from its Market Street location to a new church on Park Place. That church was designed with a full floor of classrooms on its lower level for an expanded Sunday School.

Only a decade later, Cobb offered to supply most of the funds to build an impressive new puddingstone church and parsonage on the Green. In return, he became the owner of the other church, which no longer was needed by the congregation.

After Cobb’s untimely death in a railroad accident in 1874, that church was donated, as he had planned, to the African American Methodist congregation located on Spring Street.

When Board of Ed members searched for the best superintendent and teachers they could find for the new high school, they hired an additional teacher for a school at that location.

Cobb and Vail saw their dream for the new school come true. But they did not live to see the first black student graduate from the high school in 1890. The finest high school in New Jersey was an integrated school, just as they had planned.

EARLY ‘MERGER’

Similar in design to the Morris Female Academy, the Maple Avenue School was built to the highest standards, and with the best features of any school in the state. The public education offered in Morristown proved superior to that offered at most private schools in the area.

This led to the demise of many private schools. Among them was the Morris Female
Academy, which had become Miss Dana’s School prior to its demolition in 1919.

The Township had found it financially expedient to send its public school students to Morristown. Many other area schools did the same. By 1919, the Maple Avenue School became a grade school only, and a larger high school was built on Early Street. There, the much-expanded school remains to this day.

The high school had continued to maintain its high standards and, although the poor and minorities remained in Morristown and the Township remained 98 percent white, the integrated school retained a balanced ratio of white and minority students, with the Township as a sending district.

The size of the student body enabled a broad spectrum of classes serving many needs, including gifted- and advanced programs. All of that almost was destroyed a century later, when the Township attempted to build a high school just for its students. The 1971 ruling forced a merged school district.

After protracted, often bitter, debate, it was determined that both districts would suffer from a reduced student population. The schools would have become segregated, and neither could have retained the educational quality provided by the existing high school. The merged district continues to be highly rated.

Nowadays, school mergers are prevalent throughout the state. Yet few have been as successful as Morristown’s. I believe the difference was the original vision of George Vail and his associates.

His focus was not simply on integration, but on providing the best education and teachers for its Public Schools. That resulted in the success of the new school. The average parent wants his or her child to benefit from the best school available.

The fact that minority students in Morristown often are offered scholarships to private schools is an indication that it’s talent, rather than race, which matters. Perhaps it’s time to once again consider the lessons of George Vail and his friends, and focus on the quality rather than the quantity of our public schools.

Margret Brady is a longtime resident of the historic Franklin Corners neighborhood in Morristown; a trustee of the Passaic River Coalition, with headquarters in the former home of George Vail, a National Register historic site known as Willow Hall. She currently serves as a commissioner of the Morristown Parking Authority and is a former Morristown Councilperson. Her special areas of interest are writing, research and design.

 

5 COMMENTS

  1. The Maple Ave. School was at 14 Maple Avenue, now the location of a Sustainable LEEDS office building. The School was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a parking deck. The Parking Authority added the building to the site when they replaced the old deck with a parking garage as part of the overall redevelopment of the area. Before the school was demolished, it served as a grammar school for many years. Children living in the court house area would use the staircase between the Market Street buildings to reach it The Morris Museum was begun at this location when it occupied the top floor for a number of years.

  2. Willow Hall and Historic Speedwell have an extensive collection of documents relating to the relationships between the Vail family and their relatives and associates. The activities of george Vail were often not approved by his father and led to an attempt to ignore much of what he accomplished. The local history department of the library has indexes of articles in the newspapers at the time. Google makes it possible to follow leads discovered there. Often I find items left out of one organization’s reports but located in other places provide answers and enable me to develop a chronology of events that help connect the dots.

  3. Very nice article Margaret!

    As a forty-five resident of the area, and a student of local history, I still learned a lot.

    Thank you!

  4. I enjoyed M. Brady’s article. I’m interested in knowing the sources she referenced in order to compose her piece.

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