The Burney Academy, also known as Lebanon Orphans Home, was established by the Methodist Mission Board in Marshall County near the banks of the Red River about one and half miles east of a small town called Lebanon, OK, named for Lebanon, TN, in 1854 by the Chickasaw Council, with Daugherty Colbert, Chief, and David Burney, Joel Kemp, George D. James, and A.V. Brown as school trustees. It was opened as a school for Chickasaw girls 1859, under the supervision of Cumberland Presby. Bd., Rev. Robert S. Bell and wife, teachers. The home was discontinued during the years of the Civil War and reconstruction, but was re-opened about 1872 as a co-ed school. The name was changed to Chickasaw Orphan Home and Manual Labor School in 1887. There was a capacity for 60 students.
The boys were taught agriculture and horticulture, and the girls were taught housework, cooking, washing, ironing, plain and fancy sewing, quilting, and knitting. All the students were given first class instructions in all branches of finished English education. The remaining two-story brick school building was erected at the Chickasaw Orphan Home in 1896. Steeped in Chickasaw history, the structure, now known as the Burney Institute, fell into disrepair when it was abandoned sometime after 1910 and for years stood in a cow pasture on private property. The owners were thinking about tearing down this historic brick building. However, in 2014-15, Chickasaw Nation officials funded a complete restoration of the historic landmark for possible use as a museum.
Precious Blood Catholic Church is a Roman Catholic parish in Chickasaw, Ohio. Erected in 1903 and still an active parish, the church historically owned two buildings constructed in its early years that have been designated as historic sites. Chickasaw’s first Catholics attended Mass at St. Sebastian’s Church, nearly 2 miles to the northwest. In 1897, the Chickasaw members erected a small church in their village for use as a chapel of ease during the week. Because the villagers typically did not own horses, they found it difficult to reach St. Sebastian’s, and sympathy grew for attempting to form their own parish; accordingly, in January 1903, the parishioners from Chickasaw left the church and took their possessions with them. Little more than one week later, St. Sebastian’s was destroyed by a fire (now seen as highly suspicious), and parishioners were faced with the decision of rebuilding the church. Ultimately, the parish was split into two parts: the remnant members of St. Sebastian’s rebuilt their church, while the chapel in Chickasaw became the parish church for the newly formed Church of the Precious Blood. Fifty-eight families composed the parish’s charter membership.
The parishioners quickly began to expand their facilities. Before the end of 1903, the chapel had been expanded, and the following year saw the construction of a brick rectory at a cost of about $4,000. Membership grew rapidly; by 1907, the congregation had grown from thirty-eight families to seventy. In 1908, the church decided to erect a parish school, located across the street from its rectory.mmPrecious Blood Church is one of the youngest Catholic parishes in Mercer County; only Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Montezuma and St. Theresa of the Infant Jesus Church in Rockford are newer: Our Lady parish was only a mission when Precious Blood was established, and St. Theresa parish was created in 1936.
The Precious Blood School is a two-story brick structure that is supported by a foundation of ashlar. Built in the Italianate style by the DeCurtins brothers, it features a central square bell tower that rises above the rest of the building. Individuals enter the building through double doors that are topped by an elliptical fanlight. Late in the 1950s, the Ohio General Assembly enacted a law that provided for free high school education for all Ohio students. Because of this law, Chickasaw’s public school system merged with that of the surrounding Marion Township, and the parish school closed. The parish has since sold the building; it was bought by a local organization of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and is now an apartment building. On July 26, 1979, the rectory and the former school were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Tucker Mountain Schoolhouse is a historic one-room schoolhouse on Tucker Mountain Road in Andover, New Hampshire. The small wood frame building was built in 1837 by Benjamin Tucker for $100, on land donated by his brother William. The Schoolhouse stands in a remote rural area of eastern Andover, north of the village of East Andover. It is on the east side of Tucker Mountain Road, near its northern end.
The school is a wooden post-and-beam structure, using hand-hewn timbers fastened with trunnels, covered by a gabled roof, and set on an unmortared fieldstone granite foundation. It consists of a single room. The classroom is 16 feet wide and 18 feet long. The walls are sheathed with vertical planks, covered externally with clapboards. A small ell was added to the building to provide a weather breaking entrance and a place to store firewood. A small closet in the shed contains the two-hole privy area. The interior of the school has retained its furnishings. The pupils’ heavy plank desks stand bolted to the floor as they were, and the floor slopes slightly two sides toward the center of the room to afford students in the rear a better view of the front of room, a frequently-seen design detail in the schools of this time. The interior walls are finished in wide pine boards painted flat black, which served as chalkboards. The building exterior is finished in wooden clapboards.
The building served the families of the local mountain area as a schoolhouse until 1893, when it was closed due to declining enrollments. It was acquired by a nearby resident in the 1960s and donated to the local historical society. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. It is now owned by the Andover Historical Society, and serves as a museum exhibiting details of an earlier way of education. The museum is occasionally open to the public on some Sundays in the summer, usually from 1 to 3 P.M. on the second Sunday of the month from June to October, or by appointment. It stands today in its original setting and location, in very good condition, looking much as it did when it was in active use.
Grace Mary Williams (February 19, 1906 –February 10, 1977) was an extraordinary Welsh composer, generally regarded as Wales’s most notable female composer, and the first British woman to score a feature film. Williams was born in Barry, Glamorganshire, Wales (United Kingdom), the daughter of William Matthews Williams and Rose Emily Richards Williams. Both of her parents were teachers; her father was also a noted musician. She learned piano and violin as a girl, playing piano trios with her father and her brother Glyn, and accompanying her father’s choir. At the County School she began to develop her interest in composition under the guidance of the music teacher Miss Rhyda Jones, and in 1923 she won the Morfydd Owen scholarship to Cardiff University (University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire), where she studied under Professor David Evans. In 1926 she began studying at the Royal College of Music, London, where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and the great Ralph Vaughan Williams. Other notable female composers studying with Williams at the R.C.M. were Elizabeth Maconchy, Dorothy Gow and Imogen Holst, the daughter of Gustav Holst. In 1930 she was awarded a travelling scholarship, and chose to study with Egon Wellesz in Vienna, where she remained till 1931.
From 1932 Williams taught in London, at Camden Girls’ School and the Southlands College of Education. During the Second World War, the students were evacuated to Grantham in Lincolnshire, where she composed some of her earliest works, including the Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra, and her First Symphony. One of her most popular works, Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) was also written during this period. Sea Sketches for string orchestra, written in 1944, is the first work in her mature style. This music is vividly evocative of the sea, in all its variety of moods. In 1945, she returned to her home town, remaining there for the rest of her life, dedicating herself more or less full-time to composition. In 1949, she became the first British woman to score a feature film, with Blue Scar.
Long-unperformed pieces by Williams, whose work has too often been forgotten amid the music of her male contemporaries, include her symphonic suite Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon (1939–40), her Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1941), and her Violin Concerto (1950). Her most enduringly popular work is Penillion, written for the National Youth Orchestra of Wales in 1955. Welsh-language choral settings include Saunders Lewis’s carol Rhosyn Duw, for SATB, piano and viola (1955). In Six Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, for contralto and string sextet (1958), the cycle is book-ended by two of Hopkins’ best-known poems, Pied Beauty and Windhover, her music perfectly matching the rhythmic subtlety of the texts. These are amongst her most beautiful pieces, the soft melodic and harmonic undulations in Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea) suggesting as so often in her music the swelling of the ever-present sea.
In 1960–61 Williams wrote her only opera, The Parlour, which was not performed until 1966. She revisited some of the same ideas in her Trumpet Concerto of 1963. In the 1967 New Year’s Honours, she turned down an offer of the OBE for her services to music. Despite the tradition of choral music in Wales, Williams’ portfolio of compositions were largely orchestral or instrumental pieces. Ballads for Orchestra of 1968, written for the National Eisteddfod, held that year in her home town, has all the color and swagger of a mediaeval court. Outstanding amongst her vocal works are her large-scale choral work, Missa Cambrensis (Welsh Mass) for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1971) and her setting of the Latin hymn, Ave Maris Stella, for unaccompanied SATB (1973). Her last completed works (1975) were settings of Kipling and Beddoes for the unusual combination of SATB, harp, and two horns. The last music she wrote is actually in her Second Symphony, originally composed in 1956, and substantially revised in 1975. Williams died on February 10, 1977, at the age of 70, in her hometown of Barry, Wales (United Kingdom).
My CD collection includes the following works by Grace Mary Williams:
The Town of Danville, NH, has been blessed with its share of historic places for children to learn. The first school in Danville is located atop a hill on Main Street. It was built in 1780 but burned down. was rebuilt in the early 1800’s, and still has some of its classroom desks. As the little town grew over the years, a second school house was built in 1834. It was built with a slanted floor like in a movie theater so that each child could see the front of the classroom easel. In 1895, the town built a third school for grades one through eight. It was used between 1895 and 1939. After 1939, the school was used as the town library and is now owned by the historical society and is used as a museum. Inside the museum, there is a copy of an early hand drawn map from the 1760’s.
In 1896 the town’s school district warrant included an article, which was approved, to build a new schoolhouse in the north part of the town. The town then purchased the land on Beach Plain Road from Marilla Brewster for $100 in 1895 and the White Schoolhouse was built just prior to 1900. It was used to teach students in grades 1-8 from the north end of town until 1939. In 1950 town voters approved a school district warrant article to sell the school property to the North Danville Village Improvement Society (VIS) for $1.00 with the condition that if the VIS ceased to be active, the property would be deeded back to the town for the same amount. A library, conducted by the VIS and financed by the Mary Jane Sanborn Fund, was housed there for many years. Today, it is the museum of the North Danville Historical Society.
Joseph (Josef) Charles Holbrooke (July 5, 1878 – August 5, 1958) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. Holbrooke was born in Croydon, Surrey, England. His father, also named Joseph, was a music hall musician and teacher, and his mother Helen was a Scottish singer. He had two older sisters (Helen and Mary) and two younger brothers (Robert and James), both of whom died in infancy. The family travelled around the country, with both parents participating in musical entertainments. Holbrooke’s mother died in 1880 from tuberculosis, leaving the family in the care of Joseph senior, who settled the family in London and took the position of pianist at Collins’ Music Hall, Islington, and later at the Bedford Music Hall. Holbrooke was taught to play the piano and the violin by his father, and played in music halls himself before entering the Royal Academy of Music as a student in 1893, where he studied under Frederick Corder for composition and Frederick Westlake for piano. Whilst at the academy he composed several works, chiefly piano miniatures, songs, and some chamber music, which were performed at student concerts. Whilst at the Royal Academy, Holbrooke won several prizes including the Potter Exhibition for pianoforte (1895), the Sterndale Bennett Scholarship (awarded on April 29, 1896), the Heathcote Long Prize for pianoforte (1896), and, in his final year (with the Pantomime Suite for strings), the Charles Lucas Prize for composition (1897).
After leaving the Royal Academy Holbrooke sought a variety of occupations. In 1898 he undertook a tour of Scotland accompanying the music hall singer Arthur Lloyd, but the venture failed and he was forced to return to live with his father in London. He then moved out of the family home to Harringay where he began to teach music privately, but once again without financial success. Around this time he decided to change his name from Holbrook to Holbrooke, probably in order to avoid confusion as his father was also still teaching privately. He subsequently adopted the variant Josef Holbrooke which he continued to use inconsistently throughout the remainder of his life. Responding to an advertisement in Musical News, Holbrooke travelled to Horncastle in Lincolnshire where he briefly lived with and served as musical companion to Edward Stewart Bengough (1839-1920). He was soon travelling again, conducting a touring pantomime (Aladdin and the Lamp) during the 1899-1900 Christmas season. Once more, however, the enterprise collapsed and Holbrooke was left stranded and virtually destitute, at which point Bengough sent him money to enable him to return to London.
While on tour, Holbrooke had sent the score of his orchestral poem The Raven to August Manns, conductor at the Crystal Palace. Manns accepted the work for performance and gave the premiere on March 3, 1900. Later that same year his orchestral variations on Three Blind Mice were also heard at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert, conducted by Henry Wood, on November 3, 1900. In 1901 he won the Lesley Alexander Prize for chamber music with his Sextet in F minor and also received an invitation from Granville Bantock to become a member of the staff at the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music. He accepted the position, living with the Bantocks while teaching at the institution, but rapidly became dissatisfied with the routine and returned to London in 1902. There then followed a decade of prestigious commissions and performances, with notable works including the poem for chorus and orchestra Queen Mab (Leeds Festival, conducted by the composer, October 6, 1904), the orchestral poem Ulalume (Queen’s Hall, conducted by the composer, November 26, 1904), the scena for baritone and orchestra Marino Faliero (Bristol Festival, conducted by the composer, October 12, 1905), the Bohemian Songs for baritone and orchestra (Norwich Festival, conducted by the composer, October 25, 1905), the poem for chorus and orchestra The Bells (Birmingham Festival, conducted by Hans Richter, October 3, 1906), the orchestral suite Les Hommages (Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert, conducted by Henry Wood, October 25,1906) and the choral symphony Homage to E.A. Poe (two movements first performed at the Bristol Festival, October 16, 1908). During this period Holbrooke also won a further prize, this time with his Fantasie Quartet, Op.17b entered for the 1905 chamber music competition initiated by Walter Willson Cobbett.
In 1907 Holbrooke was approached by the poet Herbert Trench who wished the composer to set his extended poem on immortality Apollo and the Seaman. This Holbrooke duly did, although only the final section of the poem (The Embarkation) is actually sung (by a male chorus), the rest of the score being a purely orchestral illustration of the verses. The completed work, styled “An Illuminated Symphony”, was first performed at Queen’s Hall on January 20, 1908, conducted by Thomas Beecham: on this occasion the orchestra and chorus were hidden from the audience behind an elaborate screen whilst the text of the poem was projected onto the screen using lantern slides at corresponding points in the music. The rehearsals for Apollo and the Seaman were attended by Thomas Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, who shortly after the first performance approached Holbrooke with one of his own poems, entitled Dylan – Son of the Wave; this resulted in the composition of the opera Dylan, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, conducted by Artur Nikisch, on July 4, 1914. The staging included another technological wonder.
Collaboration on two further operas, The Children of Don (first performed at the London Opera House, conducted by Arthur Nikisch, on June 15, 1912 – postponed from June 12) and Bronwen, brought about the completion of Holbrooke’s most ambitious project, a trilogy under the collective title The Cauldron of Annwn setting Scott-Ellis’ versions of tales from the Welsh Mabinogion. Until his death in 1946, Scott-Ellis effectively acted as patron to Holbrooke, subsidising performances and publication of many of his works. Throughout this period, Holbrooke also enjoyed a successful career as a virtuoso concert pianist. Besides his own compositions, his repertoire included the Toccata by Robert Schumann, Islamey by Mily Balakirev, Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No.1, the fantasie Africa for piano and orchestra by Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2. In 1902 Holbrooke had begun his own series of chamber music concerts to promote his music alongside new works by his British contemporaries.
Following the First World War, Holbrooke’s own music was increasingly side-lined. Performances of his own music continued only sporadically, but included several of great importance: The Children of Don (Die Kinder der Don) was given five times at the Vienna Volksoper under Felix Weingartner, and three times in Salzburg under Ludwig Kaiser (1876-1932), in 1923; Bronwen was first performed in Huddersfield by The Carl Rosa Opera Company on February 1, 1929, and then taken on tour; and the ballet Aucassin and Nicolette was performed over two hundred times by the Markova-Dolin Ballet Company during the 1935-36 season. Holbrooke had spent extended periods of time at Harlech, Wales, since around 1915, Scott-Ellis having provided him with a number of residences, and in the early 1920s he moved with his family to a house which he appropriately named Dylan. In the early hours of 9 November 1928, whilst the rest of the family were in London, fire broke out and the house was completely gutted; Holbrooke sustained serious head injuries and his music library was destroyed. This disaster precipitated a return to London where, having bought back many of the copyrights on his earlier works, Holbrooke set up his own publishing house “Modern Music Library,” operating from his various London homes: through this outlet he ensured that his compositions remained available and also issued several printed catalogues of his works.
From about the age of forty Holbrooke began to suffer problems with his hearing, eventually becoming profoundly deaf, an affliction which tended to increase his isolation and irascibility. The condition also served to curtail his career as a concert pianist; when Holbrooke revised his Piano Concerto The Song of Gwyn ap Nudd in 1923 it was for a performance given by Frederic Lamond. A “Holbrooke Music Society” was founded in 1931 to promote the composer’s works, Scott-Ellis being the Patron and Granville Bantock acting as President. Until Bantock’s death in 1946, Holbrooke maintained frequent correspondence with the older composer. Despite his neglect by the musical establishment, Holbrooke continued to compose throughout the 1930s and 1940s, working on several large-scale projects including an opera-ballet Tamlane, two further choral symphonies, Blake and Milton, both of which were probably unfinished, and choral settings of Kipling’s poetry, also unfinished. He also devoted much of his time to revising and recasting his earlier works. Whilst resident in London, Holbrooke lived at various addresses. Between September 1940 and March 1941, at the height of the Blitz, he moved out of London to live with friends in Taunton, Somerset, before returning to the capital permanently in the summer. He died at St John’s Wood, London, on August 5, 1958 at the age of eighty and was survived by his wife Dorothy (‘Dot’) Elizabeth Hadfield whom he had married in 1904. The couple had five children: Mildred (born 1905), Anton (1908), Barbara (1909), Gwydion (1912) and Diana (1915).
The following works by Joseph Charles Holbrooke are contained in my CD collection:
Auld Lang Syne Variations for Full Orchestra, op. 40.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 59, “The Grasshopper.”
The Raven, Symphonic Poem No. 1 for Orchestra, op. 25.
The Old Red Schoolhouse in Danville, NH, dates from 1780, though the schoolhouse now standing dates from 1835, and is one of the many one room schoolhouses common in late colonial times. It was the first school in the town of Danville. There is another one room schoolhouse in Danville, The Little Red Schoolhouse located on Main Street. The Old Red Schoolhouse stands on the site of a schoolhouse that was built in 1789 as a permanent school and resulted in public taxation to support it. The original schoolhouse burned in 1834. In 1835 the town voted to raise $300 to build a new schoolhouse at the site and the building that now exists was constructed as a public school in 1835. Over the years it has also been called the District #1 School or the North Danville Little Red Schoolhouse. The double pine desks that are in the building today are the ones that were used by many generations.
The town of Danville, New Hampshire, has two one room schoolhouses that can be visited. They are The Old Red Schoolhouse and The Little Red Schoolhouse dating from 1834. Danville’s Little Red Schoolhouse is associated with an important time period during the 1800’s when New Hampshire communities began to develop plans for formal public education and public school facilities that would be available to all children. Prior to that time, early schooling had generally taken place in the form of “moving schools,” usually in private homes and conducted when teachers were available; children attended when they could but there was no requirement.
The Little Red Schoolhouse, also known as the Middle District or Centre School, was built in 1834 after the Parish of Hawke (now Danville) voted to create three district schools to provide education for children in all sections of town. The Little Red Schoolhouse served as one of the town’s district schools until it closed in 1902. It was the custom for such district schools to be administered by the selectmen, who attended to the finances, while a separate Prudential Committee handled the curriculum. Initially in Danville the selectmen managed the finances and a “Superindenting” School Committee oversaw operation of the schools. By the late 1800’s a Board of Education had been established to manage both the finances and operation of the town’s schools. Danville’s town reports contain yearly accountings of the Board of Education’s achievements in educating the children in much earlier and simpler times.
These schools would service eight grades of students, who were taught physiology, composition, history, grammar, geography, arithmetic, penmanship, spelling, and reading by just one teacher. Town reports indicate that Danville’s Little Red Schoolhouse generally served 9-10 elementary students. The first teacher in the school was Miss Levinia Sanborn, and the last, in 1902, was Miss Mabel Warner. The school year consisted of thirty weeks, with a schedule fashioned around harvest time and spring planting time, a testament to a way of life built around agricultural schedules.
One room schoolhouses were Spartan with few amenities, usually limited to heat and a privy. Danville’s Little Red Schoolhouse originally had a fireplace on the outside for winter heat, which was replaced at some time with a pot-bellied stove. The building also once had an attached woodshed and privy. Its interior school room was furnished at the time with early double pine desks with bench type seats. The floor of the room was inclined from the back to the middle at an angle of twelve to fifteen degrees. The room was well lighted by seven windows and once had a fireplace on the outside for winter heat.
In addition to general maintenance and upkeep, the building has undergone restoration on several notable occasions. The building was restored by vote of the town in approximately 1940 and again by the Danville Grange as a community project in 1967. An open house was held in August 1967 and Miss Mabel Warner, the last teacher at the school in 1902, attended. In 2007 the exterior of the building was painted by a Danville Boy Scout as his Eagle Scout project. In the summer of 2014 the town replaced the wood shingle roof and made numerous repairs to the exterior boards. The town continues to maintain the building as a historic site to visit and a meeting space for occasional use.
Danville’s Little Red Schoolhouse was listed in the New Hampshire State Register of Historic Places in October of 2015. Benefits of being listed on the State Register include special consideration and relief from some building codes and regulations, designation of the property as historical (which is a pre-qualification for many grant programs), and acknowledgement of a property’s historical significance in the community. Today the school is historical place museum in Danville.
Elizabeth Township Community Center and Historical Museum
5760 E. Walnut Grove Road
Troy, Ohio
Home of the Elizabeth Township Historical Society, located in the Township Community Center, Elizabeth Township in Miami Township, OH, is one of five rural historic districts in the U.S. The township’s 1915 newly renovated school building now houses a fitness center, gym, historical museum, lounge, multipurpose room, and meeting rooms. The large 1,520 sq. ft. multipurpose room with kitchenette has a banquet capacity of 64. The 2,400 sq. ft. gym has additional theater seating for 189 and a 720 sq. ft. stage. There are five meeting rooms that have a capacity of 48. The kitchen is 1,100 sq ft. and includes seating for 48. There is no in-house food service, catering is permitted. The building is handicapped accessible with elevator.
The Elizabeth Township Historical Society was founded in 1997. The museum is housed in two classrooms in the Center, with many pictures and historical items displayed throughout the Center. One of the classrooms is dedicated to the home, farm, community, and military, containing items that were used by the people within the community in the past, including clothing, home furnishings, kitchen utensils, and items that were used in the everyday life of early families. The collection includes scrapbooks and books written by community members. The military section has uniforms, medals, and other items including shell casings, helmets, and pictures of veterans, plus notebooks containing information and pictures of veterans from the community, divided by war years.
The second room is dedicated to the schools of the community, beginning with the one room schools from the 1800’s and continuing to the present, including Miami East. There are scrapbooks covering each year since 1959 to the present. Included are pictures of the schools and students of the area, along with commencement programs and other articles concerning the early schools. There is a complete set of readers from the 1940s through the 1970s as well as early books on arithmetic, language, science, and other subjects. School archives include the histories of the schools from the four townships (Brown, Lostcreek, Staunton, Elizabeth) that make up the current Miami East Local School District, including pictures of the graduating classes, yearbooks, and sports teams. Elizabeth School scrapbooks start from the first class in 1919 and continue through 1952. Scrapbooks continue for all the classes of Miami Central as well as all their yearbooks. Miami Central School and Lena-Conover Schools combined in 1959 to form the Miami East High School. The Miami East scrapbooks contain most newspaper articles on the school, as well as news from the community. There is a large collection of sports programs from Miami County Basketball Tournaments and many of the sports programs of Miami East.
Gage Farm Schoolhouse serves students ages 3-5 in a full or part-time program offering hands-on learning and an environment that nurtures the child as a whole. Through outdoor inquiry, social-emotional learning, and a collaborative school community, Gage Farm Schoolhouse creates curious, empathetic, and confident learners. The Gage Farm is a well-known landmark in the town of Goffstown, NH, recognized by its big red barn. For nearly 40 years through 2009, it was home to the New Morning School and housed a highly regarded preschool through kindergarten program. When the long-time owners Jess and Linda Shapiro retired, they sold their beautiful property to a family who was seeking a horse farm, and the red barn with its picturesque, rolling landscape was an ideal fit.
Back in the mid-80s, Sarah Stone, attended New Morning School. Her incredible experiences there sparked an early passion for education in her even as a small child and, ultimately, inspired her to become what she is today, an early childhood educator. In her educational journey, Sarah received her Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education at the University of New Hampshire and also completed a double major in Communications and Education in her undergraduate program at Denison University. For 13 years, Sarah taught kindergarten and first grade in the Manchester, New Hampshire, School District.
Sarah and Ashley Gile began their relationship in 2017 when Ashley was the preschool teacher for Sarah’s son, Andrew. Ashley has her lead teacher certificate in Early Childhood and, in addition, has completed multiple courses in Early Childhood Education and Accounting at Southern New Hampshire University. Andrew was blessed to have Ashley as a teacher for two years. During this time, Sarah and Ashley developed a deep friendship based on a shared passion for shaping young minds and instilling in them a love of learning.
Sarah and Ashley decided to start an organization from the ground up that will provide a unique school for the town of Goffstown, its surrounding communities and their future students and families. As Sarah’s parents, David and Nancy Robator, drove along Wallace Road and saw the “For Sale” sign at Gage Farm, they knew that it was a unique opportunity to contribute to the community while assisting Sarah and Ashley in bringing their dream of a dynamic early education program to life.
Sarah’s background will serve her well as she embarks in this new endeavor as the Director and Lead Kindergarten Teacher of the Gage Farm School. She is honored to have Ashley serve as her business partner, Gage Farm’s Lead Pre-Kindergarten Teacher, and Assistant Director. That this dream would unfold in the exact location where Sarah first fell in love with learning makes this venture all the more meaningful. Sarah and Ashley are the perfect fit to build relationships with the community and inspire young minds for many years to come.
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