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Historic festival boasts period costumes and tales from a one-room schoolhouse

Historic festival boasts period costumes and tales from a one-room schoolhouse

Falls Village-Canaan Historical Society volunteer Cornelia Jacquier greets visitors at the David M. Hunt Library during the Historical Festival on Aug. 15.

Patrick L. Sullivan

FALLS VILLAGE — The year-long celebration of America’s 250th anniversary continued in Falls Village on Saturday, Aug. 15, with a bustling downtown and volunteers dressed in Colonial-era garb at a festival hosted by the Falls Village-Canaan Historical Society.

Highlights included reenactors, house tours, horse-drawn carriage rides and music.

Shortly after the event kicked off, the Historical Society’s Judy Jacobs rolled out from the Society’s headquarters on Railroad Street behind the wheel of a modern-day utility vehicle while dressed in period costume.

Jacobs made her way up to the Beebe Hill Schoolhouse, where Krista Barger and Tanya Golden delivered lessons on writing in cursive with a quill pen to a group of students.

Everyone was in period costume and character, except for a couple of moments when the teachers added some contemporary context for the child actors or visitors crowded into the tiny schoolhouse.

Golden said the one-room schoolhouse served students in kindergarten through eighth grade from 1843 to 1914. Its largest enrollment was 51 students.

Children clad in Colonial-era fashion received a lesson in cursive writingfrom a pair of teachers in the Beebe Hill Schoolhouse on Saturday, Aug. 15.Patrick L. Sullivan

Golden told the children that Beebe Hill was staffed almost exclusively by single women who boarded with local families.

The one exception was a male teacher who was allegedly strict and unpopular. The teacher was so disliked, volunteers said, that the boys decided the best course of action was to gang up on him and throw him out the window.

“That window,” said Golden, pointing to the north side of the building.

Some wondered about the fate of the strict and unpopular male teacher.

“He didn’t die,” Golden said. “But he didn’t come back either.”

At the Green, Marlinspike – a musical group consisting of Rachel Gall on fiddle, Cole Vanseters on guitar and Dan Whelan on banjo and vocals – started their set with a spirited rendition of “Paul Jones’ Victory.”

A horse-drawn carriage clopped by en route to pick up passengers farther up Main Street, while visitors ambled over to the Historical Society for reenactors and demonstrations. The Center on Main hosted a program on Alexander Hamilton later in the afternoon, and students from Lee H. Kellogg School sold drinks and snacks to raise money for the eighth grade class trip to Washington, D.C.

Patrick L. Sullivan
Senior Reporter
Patrick Sullivan has been a reporter for The Lakeville Journal since 2004, covering everything from town meetings to local characters and the outdoors. He grew up in Northern Virginia but spent summers on Mount Riga in Salisbury, giving him a lifelong connection to the Northwest Corner. A graduate of Denison University, Patrick is also the author of Tangled Lines, the newspapers’ popular fly-fishing column—making The Lakeville Journal, as far as anyone knows, the only newspaper in Connecticut with a regular fly-fishing columnist. He once received a fan letter from England, which he considers sufficient evidence that his work has achieved international acclaim.
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