It Happened in Middlebury – Chalk it up to history

This original 1897 slate chalkboard runs between the doors on one wall of a room at the former Center School in Middlebury, now home to the Middlebury Historical Society. (Agnes Lutes photo)

By AGNES C. LUTES

The beautiful Middlebury Historical Society building, originally Center School, has its original 1897 blackboards. By the time the school was built, large slate black boards were installed in nearly every school house. They were considered one of the most important educational advances of their time.

Before the advent of these large slate boards, students used small hand-held slates. About the size of a typical book, this early precursor of the iPad was a small rectangular piece of slate bordered by a protective wooden frame. Students used them to practice “writin’ and ’rithmetic” with a small scrap of slate, a chip off the old block undoubtedly obtained when one of the scholar’s slates did not survive an accidental drop to the ground.

Every day, the teacher wrote the same assignment on each child’s slate. A tiresome task for the teacher, this individual attention may have caused lessons to proceed at a snail’s pace.

Around 1900, the Binney & Smith Co. developed the chalk pencil. They mixed cement, talc and slate powder and formed it into a pointed narrow cylinder about 8 inches long. If the Binney & Smith name seems familiar to you, it is because their next two inventions were a short dustless chalk stick called Au-Du-Septic and Crayola crayons, something familiar to most of us.

The next major advance in education was the use of the large slate board. The idea for this jump from small to large slate boards is credited to James Pillans, a headmaster and teacher in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1800. As the tale goes, he took the slates from his students and hung them together on the wall to demonstrate his geography lesson.

Then in 1801, George Barron, an instructor at West Point Military Academy hung an oversize piece of slate on the schoolroom wall. The term blackboard replaced the name slate board about 1815. By 1840, they were being made commercially, due largely to advances in quarrying methods and easier transportation because of railway growth. This meant slate could be produced and shipped with significantly less labor and cost.

Slate is a rock that is formed at high temperatures and high pressures when silt or clay is compressed into a parallel alignment that easily splits into sheets. It comes in a variety of colors – gray, green, black, purple and red. Either at a quarry or at a mill, blocks of slate are split along their layers to form a sheet with a nearly perfectly flat surface. Slate is brittle, and great care must be taken with it. In slate mining, the ratio is 10 percent product to 90 percent waste.

While many of these fragile and beautiful “school house rocks” have not survived, Center School’s have lasted for more than 100 years with virtually no damage. The rooms in the school were built with 792 linear inches of slate that is 39 inches high and 3/8 inch thick, a typical width for a slate board. This makes the total weight of the slate in Room 2 alone over 2,500 pounds, a big burden for the lovely Center School to carry all these years. But carry it she does, with nary a complaint.

Their age, rarity and condition make our blackboards a significant feature of the Middlebury Historical Society. Their historical value is inestimable, and they cannot be replaced. In the school, they run down all four walls in one of the rooms and cover the south wall in the second. They are butted together end to end to form long spans except where they are interrupted by windows and doors.

Several slates in Room 1 were removed years ago and somehow disappeared when the building became a library. Just like that, history left the building. As for the remaining blackboards, you are welcome to drop by and leave your autograph on them.

Agnes Lutes is the Middlebury Historical Society vice president. You can contact the Society at 203-206-4717. The building is open Monday afternoons from 2 to 5 and other times by appointment.