HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF MEDFORD, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT, IN 1630, TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1855.
Charles Brooks, Ed.

March 7, 1807: The town voted to enlarge the school-house. After this was done, the girls and boys were taught in separate apartments.

As this house was the last in the series of old-fashioned and inconvenient models, it may be worth while to say a word about them. To speak generally, the schoolhouses had been as cheerful-looking objects as the county-jail, and quite as agreeable residences. Their windows were small; and some sashes had panes just as transparent as pasteboard or a felt-hat,--which substitutes for glass lessened the need of blinds. The outer door had a strong lock upon it, while its two lower panels were in the vocative. The seats and desks being undivided, each pupil was compelled to mount upon the seat, and travel behind his classmates till he came to his place! This operation was a standing trial of patience to those engaged in writing. The heavy tread of a careless boy upon the seat of a writer was not calculated to improve chirography or the temper. The smallest children, who had no desks before them, were packed so close together that the uneasiness and pain which nature shoots through young limbs at rest subjected them to frequent admonition and ear-twigging. They who happened to be opposite the great iron stove, which stood in the centre of the room, were almost roasted; and they literally got their learning by the sweat of their brows. They who sat near this stove through a winter would be proof against any heat to be found in this world. So violent a fire at the centre caused the wind to rush in through the unpatented ventilators,--the cracks in the windows; and a consequence was, that, while the children nearest the stove were sweltering under more than the equatorial heat of the torrid zone, they who were nearest the windows were shivering under the icy blasts of the frozen latitudes. How philosophers would have traced the isothermal lines in such a room, we know not; since, going from the centre to the circumference, one would travel through all the five zones. There was some compensation in the music which the winds made. Every schoolhouse had the true Borean harps; or, rather, winter's Panharmonicons, played upon by all the blasts in turn. The desks of the pupils became more and more interesting. Once they were wide and smooth; but, when that time was, few could remember. The adult