PLYMOUTH STATE UNIVERSITY

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Picturing the Past:A Short History of Plymouth State

Professor of History Marcia Schmidt Blaine Professor of Health and Human Performance Louise Samaha McCormack

What do the citizens of the State of New Hampshire need in higher education? The answers have guided the development of Plymouth State University over its long history. Genuine engagement, a close relationship between students and their faculty mentors, service to the state and world, cooperative work with local communities and international partners, and a vision for the future are hallmarks of a Plymouth State education.

The earliest attempts to establish higher education in Plymouth began with the chartering of Holmes Plymouth Academy. On December 7, 1808, the town received legislative permission to establish Holmes Plymouth Academy to provide “a public School … in said Town, for the benefit of the rising generation.” The purpose of the school was “to promote religion, virtue and literature, and more especially for teaching and instructing youth in English, Latin and Greek languages - in writeing [sic], music and the art of speaking, in geography, logic, mathematics, history, & agriculture, and such other branches of science as opportunity may permit.”

The new school was named in honor of Colonel Samuel Holmes of Campton, NH, a Revolutionary War veteran who donated $500 toward the academy’s foundation. Little is known of those early years. There is a chance that the school did not function from its initial inception until 1822, when the board of trustees met to discuss it. Despite local support, the school seems to have gained little attention until Samuel Read Hall became the principal of the academy in 1837. Hall is credited with starting the first teacher-training institute in the nation in Concord, Vermont, in 1829. He created what may have been the first teacher-training school in New Hampshire at Holmes Plymouth Academy. Some claim that Hall “introduced the concept of training teachers for grade positions” when he arrived at Plymouth. Others claim that he invented or popularized the blackboard. Whether either is true, Hall’s Lectures on School Keeping was a seminal text in his day. His innovations were popular, and

An 1856 watercolor of Plymouth looking north, discovered in Pease Public Library in the 1990s. The image includes the early Holmes Plymouth Academy building (center, second steeple of three) and depicts the town as early students found it. Courtesy of Pease Public Library.

enrollment reached 248 in 1838. But after Hall’s departure in 1840, the institution fell on hard times. Holmes Plymouth Academy closed in 1844, and various private and short-lived academies and seminaries used the buildings. However, the academy managed to establish the legacy upon which Plymouth State was later founded.

The state’s need for a teacher-training institute ultimately led to the renaissance of higher education in Plymouth. A statewide teacher’s organization began in 1853. The group held conferences and institutes, but the state’s teachers needed more. In 1868, the legislature approved $300 for state-supported eight-day institutes for teachers. At this point, men received about $30 a month and women received $20 a month for teaching in a school year of approximately 16 weeks. However, bills to approve a publicly supported state normal school were repeatedly killed by the legislature.

New Hampshire State Normal School and Plymouth Normal School: 1871–1939In 1870, an “act for the establishment and management of a state normal school for the better training of teachers” passed the New Hampshire legislature with a trial period of five years as long as it cost the state no more than $300 per year. After reviewing a competitive set of proposals, the state awarded the school charter to the town of Plymouth. The town bought and donated the academy buildings to the state. The town offered $7,000, the railroad committed $4,000, Plymouth citizens donated

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When Plymouth Normal School was established in 1871, the old academy building was expanded to accommodate the increased number of students and programs. The state added two wings and Plymouth’s first clock tower. Students took part in two possible courses of study: a one-year “common school” training and an optional “advanced course” for the second year.

$1,100, and the local school district put forward $600 yearly for tuition for students in school district #2.

While the state appropriated $5,000 for much-needed renovations to the old Holmes Academy buildings, it mandated that tuition was to cover the costs to operate the school. The New Hampshire State Normal School at Plymouth opened on March 15, 1871, with eight students who studied teaching in a two-term, twenty-week academic year. If they wished, students could learn the “higher branches” of content with a second academic year. The need was there, and the school quickly became popular. By 1872, with 130 students, the Normal School building was expanded. Later in the decade, the academic year changed to three terms of ten weeks each.

It was a practical education; students learned to teach by instructing elementary students in a “model” school, a hands-on experience overseen by their instructors. With increased state appropriations, the Normal School took over teaching in the local schools in 1874, dividing schools into elementary and high school grades. In a tradition that continued until 1971, instructors and upper-class students taught local students.

The New Hampshire legislature passed a bill in 1875 making tuition free to all who would teach in the state for as long as they had attended the Normal School. Because of the severe financial problems that plagued the school and the nation during the 1870s and into the 1880s, tuition became truly free only after 1886. The school all but closed in the late 1870s. In 1876, the five-year trial period ended in the midst of a nationwide depression. The school received no state funds in 1877, and it appeared that the state would withdraw all other support. In the fall of 1878, there were 251 students in the “Normal” department before a precipitous decline to 30 students in spring of 1879. Only one member of the faculty remained: Ellen Reed, the principal teacher in the training school. She kept the school going. When she left the school in 1884, Ellen Reed was praised for “her rare ability as a teacher, and her enthusiastic devotion to her work.”

After a series of reforms that included raising entrance standards, building a professional library, increasing the standard curriculum to two years, and hiring new “principal” Henry Warren as the head of school, the school began to rebound. Some have called Warren the “second founder of Plymouth.” His curricular innovations brought increased state support.

After his arrival in 1883, Principal Charles Rounds called for all state public schools to employ trained teachers and his idea spread around the state. He wrote, “The basis of successful teaching must be scholarship…. The ability of the pupil to teach what she is taught is developed and tested in practice…. The essential element is technical professional training.” The school began offering a four-year high school curriculum and Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics for both Normal School students and their pupils.

As part of their two-year “technical professional training,” students of the Normal School were engaged in hands-on training. Principal Charles Rounds noted, “The basis of successful teaching must be scholarship, accurate in character, and of a range so far in advance of that of the pupil that the instruction … may be complete and true.”

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PLYMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE