It Takes a Village

Historic Villages Practice Country School Preservation
In future posts on The Report Card we'll recap some unique times we've shared in 20 years of CSAA annual conferences. Ask any attendee you know and they'll tell you the annual conference offers a lot more than an exchange of ideas! We traditionally add the best experiences a location can offer. Grand university campuses, local museums, regional music, historic sites, trolley rides, train trips...we've sampled them all at some point in the past 20 years.
 
While our focus on country schools is not "grand" in any sense, the more simple pleasures found in them are most rewarding. Appreciating an antique hanging globe, discovering schoolhouse advertising curtains, photographing manufactured ironside desks,  hearing a song from a restored pump organ, envying a perfectly preserved set of Holbrook's apparatus...are all experiences we've been afforded.

The pleasure of a visit is multiplied when our schoolhouse tour is part of a historic village. There we get to step into a period home, a country store, a meeting house or chapel, a firehouse, a barn, a barber shop, a dentist office, or possibly a bank, well preserved and outfitted with furniture and proper artifacts. We always make a beeline to the schoolhouse though.

New London Historical Society
In 2017 the CSAA annual conference was held at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. After a full day of presentations,  we paid a visit to the New London Historical Society a half a mile away. This perfect, small New England town boasts of a historic village of 15 buildings representative of the 1800's in New Hampshire.

The 2-MINUTE video below (GET ACQUAINTED WITH THE VILLAGE) gives a brief overview of what we saw there, but the two buildings we want to call attention to are schoolhouses, one of them being REPURPOSED into the Colby, Greenwood & Seaman's Country Store. A slide show follows...

Note: Next month we'll visit West Bay Common School Children's Museum in League City, Texas!

GET ACQUAINTED WITH THE VILLAGE