Historic leaves, volume 7, April, 1908 - January, 1909

[28] March 3. We can imagine the scholars were not wholly in tears, as they escaped the ordeal of an examination that season. The late Mrs. Sarah Tufts Kidder attended the Milk Row School at the time it was burned. It has come to us through a reliable source that this old building was a ‘double decker,’ that is, not a two-story structure, but with a gallery running around on three sides of the schoolroom, thus affording seating capacity for gatherings of all kinds.

The report of 1819 says: ‘The district commences in Cambridge road, sweeps around the Cambridge line, runs across Milk Row by Isaac Tufts' to Winter Hill, by the house of Joseph Adams, Esq., to Mystic River, and down to the cluster of houses near the entrance of 3 Pole Lane, and over to the place of beginning. It contains sixty-one families and 106 children, from four to fourteen, about one-third of whom are under seven years of age.’

The following May it was voted that the new Milk Row School be erected where the former one stood. Isaac Tufts and James K. Frothingham were made a building committee, and it was decided to build of wood. The house was completed by October. ‘Its sides were filled in with brick and it was finished in a plain, neat style with two coats of paint on the outside.’ The cost was $675. Its predecessor had succumbed to the flames after a service of twenty-two or twenty-three years. This newer one, the last of the Milk Row schools, after housing a generation of children was destined to a like fate.

October 22 of that year, the school, which was in charge of Miss Charlotte Remington, was visited by Rev. Edward Turner, Isaac Tufts, and James K. Frothingham, three of the trustees. ‘They were highly gratified with the specimens of the children's improvement, particularly in reading.’ This was the first public gathering in the new building. The winter term (1819-20) was kept by Daniel Russell, who had been in charge for three seasons, and at the close the commendatory word was that the school had passed an examination ‘which was highly creditable to themselves and their instructor.’ Paige, in his History of Cambridge, p. 650, states that Daniel Russell was eldest son of