Charlie Farrell was driving along Route 12 in Northfield on a sunny July morning when a little red house with a large bank of windows caught his eye.
So he pulled over, took out his roadmap, and found his location. And there it was: a tidy, hand-written red X. Bingo.
He had found another school.
Though they live on in new forms — most have been converted into private homes — old schoolhouses are easy to spot, if you know the signs. Happily for schoolhouse hunters, they are often right on the roadside. They usually feature a big bank of windows. Sometimes they have two front doors: one for boys, one for girls. And if you’re really lucky, and it wasn’t melted down for munitions in World War II, you might spot a bell.
Farrell knows precisely what to look for. Because for nearly two decades, he has been on a singular quest: to find, photograph, and inventory every school in Vermont that ever was — at least, if a record exists of it.
The retired middle school teacher has put thousands of miles on his Prius, traveling the bumpy backroads of Vermont to catalogue the schoolhouses of yesteryear. He’s amassed about 2,000 pages of notes and photographs, organized alphabetically by town, stored in purple binders. Farrell hesitates to guess when his work might be done, or to estimate how many schools are left to find.
“I mean, even my town that I live in now, I can't say it's completely crossed off the list, because I have one school that I think still exists, but I haven't been able to identify it yet,” he said. “One of these days, I'm going to kidnap the town historian and bring him up there.”
A spreadsheet tracking his effort already spans over 4,500 entries and he’s amassed over 2,700 photos — although some may be duplicates. Farrell has visited every town in Vermont, but says he’s only done an intensive road search in about 50 of them. His records for some regions, like Bennington and Orleans counties, remain comparatively scant. But some towns were easy.
“St. George, Vermont — two schools in its entire history,” Farrell said. “Check that one off the list!”
A self-described “compulsive collector,” Farrell set out on this project in 2006 upon discovering a book cataloguing Vermont’s historic inns and taverns. He wondered if anything similar existed for schools in the state and headed to the Silver Special Collections at the University of Vermont library to find out. He didn't find what he was looking for there, or in the state’s archives, or at the Vermont Historical Society.
“And so the Vermont Schoolhouse Project was born,” he said.
His effort, once complete, will therefore represent a unique contribution to the history of Vermont. While plenty of town historians have attempted to make a record of local schoolhouses, no statewide compilation exists.
“Charlie’s the first,” confirmed Prudence Doherty, the public services librarian at UVM’s Silver Special Collection.
At least one other person may have attempted a similar feat, and it is Farrell, of course, who has discovered their efforts. While rooting around in Barre at the Vermont Historical Society (itself housed in a former school), Farrell came upon a trove of some 70 photos of schoolhouses taken in the 1920s across the state. The photographer was a man named Arthur Wentworth Hewitt, who once served as the chair of the State Board of Education.
Farrell isn’t sure about the extent of Hewitt’s travels, but his pictures have since cropped up elsewhere. A town history of Ripton. The Bennington Museum. Farrell was tickled to notice Hewitt’s old Ford in some of his photos, because it seemed such a visual parallel to his own iPhone pictures, which often capture his Prius parked on the roadway.
“When I found out about this guy, it was like, ‘Oh, well, it's me — 100 years ago,’” Farrell said.
History, of course, repeats itself in more ways than one. Farrell met a reporter last week in Roxbury, where he took a picture of the town’s newly-closed village school to include in his archive. Echoes of today’s pitched debates about school closures and demographic change are everywhere in Farrell’s research binders.
One of his favorite stories, from around the turn of the 20th century, is about the so-called Pearl School in Grand Isle. The southern part of the island eventually became more populated, and so after a close election, local residents moved the school, using log rollers and oxen, to be closer to the new population center. In the dead of night, the school’s former neighbors stole the school back, bringing it to its original site. (The Pearl School was moved a third time, to the more southern part of the island, and the building now serves as a private home.)
The history of Vermont is littered with examples of failed and bitterly contested attempts at education reform. But demographic trends and the economy have usually dictated the opening and the closing of schools.
“Sometimes they would close a school for up to a decade and then reopen it,” Farrell said. “Go out and dust it all out, repaint it, put it back into use if the population suddenly increased in that district.”
One of Farrell’s trustiest research tools has been the Beers atlases — hand-drawn town maps from the 1870s that depict the thousands of school districts that once existed in Vermont. He’s carefully superimposed the locations of old schools from the atlases onto a modern roadmap with little red X’s. When he’s out on the road and he sees an old building that looks promising, he checks his map.
For a long time, Farrell stuck to strictly old-school research methods, sourcing information from town reports, historical societies, newspaper archives and the like. He was leery of social media, but in 2023 he finally created a Facebook page for the Vermont Schoolhouse Project. The public page, which now counts over 1,000 members, has become a goldmine for leads and an unexpected source of community.
“I just get a kick out of how there are, like, mini-class reunions happening on the site,” he said.
Originally, Farrell had planned to publish a book, like the one that inspired his project. And he believes he still may, at least to showcase the most interesting stories he’s come across. But his comprehensive inventory of schools, he said, is already far “too ungainly.”
And so he plans to donate his research to UVM, the state’s archives, and the Vermont Historical Society, whenever he’s done, or simply can’t keep going.
“The next generation can take it wherever they wish,” he said.
