CHAPTER VIII 



EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS 



How the Future of the Child is Anticipated and the Schools Turn out the Men 

 and Women of Tomorrow — Churches — How the Spiritual and Moral 

 Welfare is looked After — Hospitals — Benevolent and Charitable Institu- 

 tions — Cemeteries. 



N educational facilities The Bronx possesses all that 

 can be desired. No civic institutions have been 

 more zealously looked after by the municipality 

 than the public schools. True, some of the lower 

 grades have been necessarily put on part time be- 

 cause of the enormous increase in population in the last 

 two years; but many new schools are now in course of erection 

 and the work is being pushed with all vigor so that in due time 

 there will be a seat for every child in The Bronx. 



Search among the old records has failed to reveal just where 

 and when the first school in the Borough was established. It was 

 in a quaint little story-and-a-half schoolhouse once standing just 

 east of the old Boston Post Road, now Third Avenue, and One 

 Hundred Fifty-sixth Street that the gentry of the neighborhood, 

 including the various branches of the Morris family, learned the 

 rudiments of reading, writing, and ciphering. Bolton in his "His- 

 tory of the County of Westchester" says that the first schoolhouse 

 in Eastchester was erected in 1683, but it hardly seems possible 

 that the burghers' children with their thirst for knowledge were 

 so long without a school. 



In Westchester the English school was established and main- 

 tained by the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 

 Foreign Parts. The first schoolmaster of whom we have any rec- 

 ord is Edward Fitzgerald who served in 1709. He seems to have 

 taught in the school only provisionally, for in that year the Rev. 

 John Bartow wrote to the Society recommending the appointment 

 of Daniel Clark, the son of a clergyman, as schoolmaster. Mr. 

 Clark served from 1710 to 1713, when he was succeeded by Charles 

 Glover, who held the position until 1719. Mr. Glover was paid a 



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