Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

Abstract

Walking to school in Connecticut is now so atypical that the experience makes news each October on National Walk to School Day. Students at schools throughout the state are dropped off at designated meeting spots less than a mile from their destination. At the chosen moment, the procession moves out along the sidewalk under the supervision of teachers, parental chaperones, and sometimes police. An exercise promotion with hints of historical reenactment, Walk to School Day gives twenty-first-century children a taste of what it was once like to travel by foot.1 The national promoters of the event, along with state officials, hope to encourage a return to a daily form of childhood exercise that previous generations took for granted. Yet Connecticut parents balk at suggestions for unsupervised walking in an era of fast traffic and possible abductions. “What parent in their right mind is going to let a 6-year-old walk to school?” asked a West Hartford mother, protesting a town plan to build more sidewalks.2By 2018, nearly 80 percent of Connecticut public school students relied on school transportation, mostly buses. On average, it costs $1,288 a year to transport a Connecticut child to school, for a total state expenditure of $560.6 million. Many of the unbused students are dropped off at school by a parent, a growing national trend made obvious by morning traffic in school driveways.3The shift from walking to riding has been a major historical change in childhood experience. By 2017, according to a national study, children aged five to sixteen spent an average of nearly forty minutes a day sitting in a vehicle.4 In the daily life of a child, that means an additional forty minutes of confined inactivity under adult control: a significant infringement on a child's autonomy, exercise, and presence in public space. This essay will trace how such a shift began in Connecticut. Roughly speaking, the transition to riding occurred in three phases. First, in the first half of the twentieth century, the availability of motorized school buses accelerated the consolidation of rural school systems, closing the one-room schoolhouses that were within walking distance of many children in the Connecticut countryside. Second, the rapid suburbanization of the state after 1945—particularly in Fairfield, New Haven, and Hartford counties—meant that a rising percentage of children lived outside the dense urban environments where schools remained within walking distance. Third, concerns about pedestrian safety and child abduction at the end of the twentieth century discouraged even short walks to school. This essay will focus on the first of these three phases, when large numbers of children first became passengers and lost control over the geography of their daily lives.Historians have not written much about school busing, except as a method of producing racial integration since the mid twentieth century.5 Works on the history of education briefly mention the bus as the technology that expedited the replacement of one-room schoolhouses with larger, modern “consolidated” schools.6 Sociologists and geographers have provided a useful interpretive frame by examining the larger trend of children's declining access to public space.7 Cultural historians and historians of childhood have provided helpful background: it seems that both the educational reforms and the willingness to bus children arose from a common cultural source. By the late nineteenth century, there was a rising commitment among educated Northerners to make childhood closely supervised, distinct from adult life, and centered on the home. These ideas were prevalent mostly among the urban middle class. They were resisted by working-class and farm families who valued the self-reliant child and the child willing to labor at a young age. This conflict could be seen in disagreements about the enforcement of vagrancy, truancy, and child labor laws. Urban middle-class parents in the early twentieth century developed strong concerns about the physical safety of children, whose lives were seen as increasingly precious but who were endangered by the growth of motorized traffic. Children, they believed, needed to be sheltered from the world. These beliefs have of course persisted, though they have taken new forms. Parents since about 1980 have grown particularly concerned about “stranger danger,” the heavily publicized but statistically rather slim chance that a child will be abducted and abused while away from the home. Parents and public officials acting on these fears, as the geographer Gill Valentine has observed, have defined “public space as ‘naturally’ or ‘normally’ an adult space where children are at risk.” Out of place in public, children now spend most of their lives playing or studying in indoor environments, in which they have developed a greater tendency to obesity—one of the concerns that recent “walk to school” efforts are intended to address.8In the 1800s and early 1900s, the desire to keep schools within walking distance meant that Connecticut was generously sprinkled with schoolhouses. There were some 1,635 schoolhouses in 1893, an average of nearly ten for each of the state's 168 townships. Virtually every little village had a one-teacher, one-room schoolhouse serving what we would now call elementary and middle school students. Even in completely rural districts most children had a school within a mile and a half of their homes. Newtown, whose fifty-seven square miles makes it one of the largest towns by area, had nineteen schoolhouses in 1893 to serve a registered student body of only 591 children. Out in the woods of eastern Connecticut, the sparsely populated town of Union maintained six schoolhouses even though it had only forty-eight school-age children. The distances to and from school still discouraged Union children from going home for lunch, a common practice in the cities and more significant villages. Passing the noon hour “under the trees with the teacher, [they] come into the closest sort of personal touch with the influence of the instructor,” according to a 1905 description of Union. There was a sense of neighborly familiarity in the one-room schoolhouse, usually experienced positively, and in some schools a family atmosphere: brothers, sisters, and cousins of different ages sat together, perhaps in the same benches once occupied by their parents. Some rural schoolhouses had fewer than ten students, but others in more densely settled areas had forty or more of varying ages between five and sixteen, creating a nearly impossible situation for the overworked teacher. Fortunately, many children were regularly absent.9The buildings and the teachers were of varying quality, some of them truly awful. Connecticut schoolhouses were typically about twenty feet by fifteen or twenty feet, including an entrance hall. The classroom contained a teacher's desk, wooden benches for the students, usually a blackboard, and sometimes a globe and a few books. “Schoolhouses are found which in outward appearance resemble dilapidated sheds and whose interiors are miserably furnished, poorly lighted and heated, and badly ventilated; and outhouses in such unsanitary condition as to constitute a menace to public health and morals,” complained a 1906 state report. The menace to morals, a later report acknowledged primly, included students’ decoration of outhouse walls “with pictures and sentiments suggestive of evil.” During class time, one group of children demonstrated their knowledge through recitation, while teachers struggled to keep the rest of the class hushed and focused on individual tasks such as memorizing geography or solving arithmetic problems. As a student in the 1860s, Wilbur L. Cross recalled, “We spent most of the time in pinching each other to the disturbance of the recitations.” Some nineteenth-century schoolmasters had themselves never completed high school, while other schools were blessed with trained and talented educators. In the winter of 1881, the twenty-five or thirty students at the Gurleyville School in Mansfield were taught by a bookish young neighbor, the formerly pinch-prone Wilbur L. Cross himself, who already “showed marked capabilities as a teacher” at the beginning of a career that would feature a stint as a Yale professor and later as Connecticut's governor. The vast majority of Connecticut teachers by the turn of the century were women. Many were young and inexperienced; their paltry wages averaged less than half of what men made.10Children everywhere walked to and from school. This walk was a time of freedom in which they could converse or play without adult supervision and sometimes get into serious trouble. Newspaper articles record some of the more bizarre and harmful events that took place along country roads or village streets. Children made interesting finds including a liquor bottle, a bag of money, and a corpse. They could drown walking across thin ice, break bones or sprain ankles while roughhousing, get electrocuted by fallen trolley wires, and sustain serious injuries jumping onto passing wagons. They narrowly escaped being run over by trains while walking along the tracks. They were attacked by vicious dogs and in one case, an aggressive deer. Some were stalked, accosted, or assaulted by sexual deviants. Children were roughed up by older schoolmates and learned bad words. Doubtlessly, like their counterparts in other states, they fought, told obscene stories, and smoked tobacco.11 Nonetheless, parents focused their concerns on the length of the walk and the effects of the weather. Attendance dropped off on rainy or snowy days; students who lived the farthest (up to three miles) would stay home then.12American educational reformers had been complaining since the mid-nineteenth century that rural schoolhouses were falling farther and farther behind the graded schools found in urban areas. Teachers were better trained and better paid in the cities, where the large buildings and large enrollments enabled age-specific, graded classrooms, and enrichment programs like music and art. The superior primary schooling in cities, plus the greater availability of high schools, was said to be a further motive for families to leave the countryside. How could rural townships compete? Perhaps bigger schools would help. Connecticut legislation dating back to 1866 enabled town governments to create consolidated school districts, stripping authority from the neighborhood-level district committees that held a tenacious grip over individual schoolhouses. Neighborhood and village loyalties prevented consolidation in many towns, an attitude that a later state official dismissed as “the dread of any change.” The conflict revealed a deeper clash of values. Country folk, it seemed, did not want to lose the little schoolhouse that represented local autonomy, community identity, and family togetherness—as well as an available space for local gatherings. Some farmers feared the loss would also hurt property values. In 1896, thirty years after the legislation passed, schools in 114 Connecticut towns were still organized on the old system of neighborhood districts that had fallen into disfavor in Massachusetts and other states.13Discussion of one-room schoolhouses in Connecticut was shaped by a national culture of rural nostalgia. Journalists and other writers repeatedly referred to the one-room school as “the little red schoolhouse,” despite the fact that most of those in Connecticut by the twentieth century were painted white. The sentimental icon of the little red schoolhouse had been familiar in American fiction and memoirs since the mid-1800s (back in the old days when nostalgia was better!) and was highlighted in movies with that title in 1923 and 1936.14 A spate of texts on the woes of America's country schools appeared in the early twentieth century, inspired by the confluence of a strong push for school consolidation and a vogue of hand-wringing about rural decline. The pro-rural magazine Country Life in America had begun publication in 1901 with a lead article on New England's many abandoned farms, and President Theodore Roosevelt had launched his “Commission on Country Life” in 1908 in a belated attempt to slow America's transition to an urban industrial society.15 “The city sits like a parasite, running out its roots into the open country and draining it of its substance,” declared country-life crusader Liberty Hyde Bailey, a horticulture professor, former editor of Country Life in America, and chairman of Roosevelt's commission. “The city takes everything to itself—materials, money, men—and gives back only what it does not want . . . Many country places are already sucked dry.” Despite Bailey's call for a “back-to-the village movement,” the drift of population to the cities continued. The United States as a whole would become 51 percent urban (generously defined) by 1920.16Connecticut's population—one of the densest in the nation—was heavily clustered in the cities and larger mill villages. By one measure, only 10 percent of Connecticut's people lived in truly rural districts in 1910. Some rural townships had been losing population continuously as generation after generation sought brighter opportunities in urban factories or fertile Midwestern farms, and the decline continued.17 From 1900 to 1920 population dropped in a slight majority (fifty-four) of all the 106 Connecticut towns that began the century with fewer than 3,000 people. A 1916 state report tried to give a positive description for one of eastern Connecticut's backwaters: “Chaplin is one of those quiet and homelike communities so characteristic of rural and agricultural New England. The population has steadily decreased since 1850 and there are now about 400 people living within the borders of the town. The people are extremely homogeneous in character and live a quiet and peaceful agricultural life.” Chaplin and similar towns were reaching their low point. After bottoming out in 1910, 1920, or 1930, populations rose throughout rural Connecticut in the 1930s, even in eight unfortunate little townships that had declined in every previous census since the Civil War.18The “back-to-the-village” perspective espoused by Bailey's Country Life movement was not quite the same as the hyperlocal understanding of geography common in rural Connecticut. The Country Life movement actually supported school consolidation, which in Connecticut would broaden local allegiances to the somewhat larger community of the township. Reforming rural education would supposedly apply to country life the benefits of superior organization, expertise, and modernity hitherto associated with the city. But Connecticut Yankees clung to a consciousness of smaller-scale geography. The hyperlocal mindset was reflected in the enormous number of place names used in the state. An annual state publication, the State Register and Manual, listed in its 1912 edition about 1,200 villages and districts too small even to have post offices. These included nine places called Chestnut Hill, seven called Flanders, four Goshens (not including the separate township named Goshen), three Clapboard Hills, and two places claiming the evocative name of Woodtick. These duplications, among many others, tell us something about the tight compass of daily life: locals hearing “Chestnut Hill” or “Flanders” would probably know only the closest one. The small size of these shrinking villages and districts made their local significance tenuous in the decades around 1900, a time when road improvements let farmers travel farther afield to sell their crops and buy supplies. Some places lacking a post office, church, blacksmith, or general store found the schoolhouse to be their only defining institution, and the daily foot travel of children to be their most visible regular performance of local identity. When town officials decided to close the schoolhouse at Stockings Corner, Johnson Hollow, Haughton, Skungermaug, Winthrop, or Mudgetown, these places would inevitably fade in public consciousness and might eventually disappear from memory, except perhaps as preserved in the names of roads and old burying grounds.19Partly because of the small size and high population density of the state, even many rural areas were easily accessible to nearby towns and cities by steam train and by a well-developed system of interurban electrics. “There is a great deal of moving around of the people and a consequent extremely heavy demand upon transportation facilities,” observed a 1922 article in the trade publication Bus Transportation. “In other words, there is a rather high riding habit, which is a natural result of the state's population, and geography. . . . ” The “riding habit,” the practice of traveling in a vehicle rather than by foot, may have been common among workingmen who commuted to factories, farm women going on shopping trips, and farmers driving their wagons to market along newly improved roads, but it was only just beginning to be important in children's journey to school.20Townships needed a lot of nudging to make them close schoolhouses in depopulated districts. The state legislature passed a law in 1893 explicitly permitting towns to spend tax money to convey students to and from school, but many clung to the one-room schoolhouses. “Our attitude is this—every dollar spent in carrying scholars, beyond what is absolutely and manifestly necessary, is a dollar wasted. School money is not intended for horse hire, but for purposes of education,” reported one of the more compliant towns, Enfield. Enfield made the difficult decision to maintain schoolhouses only in Thompsonville, Scitico, Wallop, and four other places. Children who once walked to school in Jabbok and Hubbard would now have to be transported, against the inclinations of both Enfield officials and the local public. Farmington was another early convert to school consolidation and transportation. Students traveled by wagon, trolley and train to the Union and Center schools. Enfield and Farmington found consolidation to be educationally and financially advantageous, but the experience varied in other towns. Rural teachers’ wages were so low in the early twentieth century that it was sometimes cheaper to keep the one-room schools open than hire a teamster to carry the children to a central school, as parents pointed out in 1914 in the town of Chatham (soon to be renamed East Hampton). The closing of Connecticut's one-room schools was a long process. (See Fig. 5). Seventy-two were still in operation in the 1948–1949 school year. It appears that the last one finally shut its doors in 1967.21Educational reformers had greater initial success in encouraging the growth of high school education among a rural population that had previously schooled its children only through their early teens. Lacking the population to sustain their own high schools, rural townships relied on the high schools in the closest city or large mill village. The state government encouraged this trend by subsidizing tuition and transportation for such children. In 1897–98, the first year of the tuition subsidy, 136 students from thirty-two towns attended out of town high schools. By 1903–04, the first year that the state paid half the cost of their transportation, 813 students from seventy-six towns were attending out of town high schools, representing 8 percent of Connecticut high school enrollment. Within a few years, high schools in Killingly, Middletown, Putnam, and Windham were drawing more than a third of their students from their hinterlands, becoming in effect regional high schools. High school attendance was growing fast, assisted by school transportation. Connecticut high school enrollment in 1920 reached 27,426, nearly five times the 1899 enrollment.22Before transportation was available, some education-minded rural parents had been paying for their sons and daughters to board in the city where they attended high school. Transportation ensured that high school students could live at home under parental guidance. “There are reasons for providing conveyance,” explained the state Board of Education in 1908: Family life is dear to many people, and much store is set by home influence . . . Frequently circumstances do not enable parents to make proper arrangements for board and oversight, when children are obliged to reside away from home. After a certain age, children must in any case learn to look out for themselves, and here a careful upbringing insures the development of moral qualities which are a safeguard against idleness and temptation after the time comes when parental restraint is of necessity removed. But the matter of age is a vital one. A boy of sixteen or seventeen may be able to fight his own battle, but not so those who younger. Hence it becomes of great importance that pupils should be kept as long as possible at home or in local schools.23Rural towns searched for the most economical ways to transport the high school students. Initially, the cost of door to door transportation seemed excessive even with the state subsidy. Most students walked to the closest train station or electric railroad stop and rode along with the regular passengers until they got within walking distance of the high school. A total of 544 of the 721 students transported to high school in 1903–04 rode these trains. Only 109 were carried by wagon to school, and sixty-five of the remaining ones relied on some mix of wagons, trolleys and steam railroads. One student rode a bicycle. For some children, these journeys totaled ten or twenty miles each way. A few rural towns avoided the transportation problem by simply refusing to pay for their children to attend high school anywhere. Nonetheless, the high school education trend was already so advanced by 1909, warned state officials, that the existing high schools would soon have to put limits on enrollments from out of town.24Primary education proved a harder nut to crack. Reformers made a renewed push for consolidation of local district schools in the early twentieth century. As empty school-benches showed how much population had drained from rural hilltop districts, and as the weathered buildings slumped into further disrepair, it was increasingly obvious that rural schools were falling ever farther behind their urban counterparts. Urged on by the Teachers’ League of Connecticut and Gov. George L. Lilley, the state legislature in 1909 passed a compulsory consolidation act putting town governments in charge of public education. This act eased the move to centralized town control, but did not force towns to close any of the scattered schoolhouses. Some rural townships even ignored the legislation outright and continued to let neighborhood district committees run the schools.25In towns that did find enough political will or financial incentive to close one-room schoolhouses, transportation presented even greater problems than in the case of high school students. Potentially much greater numbers of children would be affected, and even though their journey to school would be shorter, a bigger proportion of the journey would be over unpaved local roads. A few journeys even involved a boat ride over a river. Trolley transportation presented the least trouble for school officials; young children in some rural towns rode electric trolleys if the routes ran along nearby roads or could be reached by walking across the fields. But, as one school official warned, unsupervised rides could lead to “bad morals being learned from contact with rough people,” and in any case trolley routes were limited. The preferred form of transportation for young children by the early 1910s was the horse-drawn wagon, a vehicle that could range from a crudely repurposed farm cart to a custom-built, large carriage.26 According to a 1911 article in the Journal of Education, “school wagons” reduced truancy, tardiness, illness, and misbehavior. “The pupils are protected from storms; quarreling and fighting on the way to and from school are prevented; the opportunity for intimidation and acts of violence by the strong toward the weak is removed,” wrote Kansas school superintendent Edward T. Fairchild. “The morals of the pupils are guarded and controlled on the way to and from school.”27 School officials in Connecticut echoed these opinions in their annual reports, as did their counterparts across the United States. Ellwood P. Cubberly, a Stanford education professor and prolific writer on rural schools, cheered the broader Progressive Era trend toward greater official control of children's lives. “Child life is everywhere experiencing to-day a new lengthening of the period of dependence and training,” he wrote in a 1909 book. “Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the state, and less and less to the parent.”28Connecticut parents were actually quite protective of their younger children, particularly of their physical wellbeing on long journeys in bad weather. Children's passage to school would not necessarily be any quicker if they rode in a wagon to a central “consolidated” school than if they walked to the local district schoolhouse. Towns tried to save money whenever possible by transporting children from a shared collection point. Children now had to walk along familiar routes to their old, shuttered schoolhouse, then wait with their classmates for the hired teamster to show up, and finally ride for the last leg of the journey to the new school. In the early twentieth century, a wagon ride along rutted roads could be a chilling, bone-jarring ordeal, sometimes exposed to the elements, sometimes protected by heavy curtains that shut out the view and the light. Parents complained. “Many prefer that their young children walk in preference to riding in the cold,” reported the state-appointed supervisor for Mansfield, where complaints forced the reopening of the defunct Spring Hill School in 1911. In Oxford, parents complained that “children [are] colder and more apt to be sick riding than walking.” The town of Sharon in 1910 decided to buy blankets, robes and foot warmers for the passengers, and directed one of the wagon owners to install cushions. Transportation was said to improve attendance, but it lengthened some children's time away from home. Some students who climbed onto the school wagon at seven o'clock in the morning didn't return home until five o'clock in the evening.29Parental opposition—combined with the slow speed of horse-drawn wagons and the complexity of rounding up students in the far corners of town—seemed to put discouraging limits on school consolidation. The state-appointed superintendent for North Stonington and Lisbon suggested in 1915 that it might be possible to overcome narrow local loyalties if there was a “great amount of work done in building up a [town-wide] spirit by public meetings, out-of-door field days, etc.” But, he warned, the more distant areas would remain a problem. “The families should not settle in such distant places,” he wrote. “People should be induced to locate their residences in central places.”30 Another occasional complaint voiced by Connecticut parents and public officials was that the ease of riding to school would make children soft, passive, and unappreciative of the value of education. Regrettably, children's opinions on the matter are very difficult to find in the historical record. I have been unable to locate comments by any Connecticut child on what would seem to be the momentous shift from walking to riding.31Parents who resisted the closing of their local schoolhouse found some unexpected support in 1923, when Acting Governor Hiram Bingham gave a speech denouncing school consolidation. Bingham himself was not some narrow-minded Yankee farmer. Born in Hawaii to missionaries, he had received an elite American education culminating in a Ph.D. in Latin American History. He traveled widely through South America and served as a Yale professor before entering politics. He won international fame in 1911 by claiming to have rediscovered the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. Bingham's reasons for opposing Connecticut school consolidation were philosophical rather than reactionary: he saw it as another step in an alarming global trend toward centralization and authoritarianism. The disappearance of the little country school was undermining local democracy and rural development, just at the moment when technological change was reversing the movement from the countryside to the city, Bingham declared. “During the twenty years in which we have seen automobiles develop from the scarce and curious toy of the few to the useful servant of the many, one-half of Connecticut's smaller towns have shown an increase in population.” He claimed, a bit prematurely, that “even the very small towns with a population of less than 1,000 seem to be turning the corner.”32Bingham was right that rural towns would soon see their population return to, and then surpass, their nineteenth-century peaks. The growth of automobile traffic seemed to promise that rural homes would increasingly fall within acceptable commuting range for city workers. Thanks to advances in mass production, car prices were dropping into the price range of working-class families and ordinary farmers. By 1923, when Bingham gave his speech, there were 155,000 cars in Connecticut, up from 2,700 in 1907. Thanks in part to gasoline taxes and an influx of federal aid in the late 1910s and 1920s, Connecticut launched an energetic program of paving, widening, straightening, and grading its network of highways. “The state has been progressive in providing, as it has, about 1,600 miles of improved highways,” reported Bus Transportation. “Connecticut has a system of state highways which is second to none in the United States.” Rural township