SCHOOL PROGRESS AND riFE ACADEMY. 39 I 



These committees chosen from different parts of the 

 town, with the mistaken idea that the people of each dis- 

 trict were the best judges of the school interests of that 

 district, were appointed year after year for more than a 

 quarter of a century. In 1822 there was indeed an attempt 

 to divide school management still further by making King 

 Street into a district, but that failed. That same year 

 there was made an effort in the opposite direction by ap- 

 pointing a town committee of three to visit these district 

 committee schools in the interest of the whole town. The 

 district committees were to notify the visiting committee 

 when they were all ready to be visited and to go with the 

 visitors to their school. What a red-letter day it must 

 have been when these six men, or as many as would go, 

 crowded into the little schoolhouse to hear the children 

 "speak pieces" and "spell " and go through various per- 

 formances for show ! 



But there was yet another movement towards unity in 

 the year 1828. Before that time the district committees 

 had cared for their own schools, even to the extent of 

 building new ones, but in that year it was voted " to pay 

 the several school districts in the town for their school- 

 houses and in the future to build and support all the 

 schoolhouses in their corporate capacity." A new dis- 

 trict was separated out of the North and South Ends 

 by taking one third of the children from each to form 

 the Center district. But the five districts never became 

 so separate again as they had been. The State law 

 now required every town to choose a superintending 

 committee, and by the year 1830 we had settled to a com- 

 mittee of three to hold our school system in order. 

 Indeed, there was not much that could be called system 

 until within the last fifty years, when " grades " have been 

 established. It was one of the unremitting labors of the 

 late Rev. Joseph Osgood, in his long service for the town, 

 to bring about this uniform teaching and systematic pro- 

 motion in our schools. 



