Well, Well.

So I was driving along Route 25 in Monroe and I saw what I thought had to be a small blue one-room schoolhouse across a frozen lake. My first thought was Damn you, Monroe, you lied to me! I had thought there were only two schoolhouses in Monroe. (My second thought was that "Damn you, Monroe, you lied to me!" sounded like something Alexander Hamilton would have said.)

I finally figured out how to get up close to the building. It did not, as I'd feared, involve driving or walking over ice. It did involve ever so slightly trespassing onto the Centennial Watershed State Forest, but, these things happen.

And what I found was so much better - or perhaps I should say, so much rarer - than a schoolhouse. The diminutive structure was really Stepney Well No. 1, of the former Bridgeport-Hydraulic Company (now known as Aquarion.)

If you're thinking Wait, back up, WTF is Stepney? don't worry, it's just a part of Monroe. It's fairly big, pretty much a town of its own. But it's not a town of its own, so the first time you see it you can get confused. Same goes for its southern neighbor, Tashua. If you're thinking Wait, there's a Tashua? there isn't, not exactly. It's just a part of Trumbull.

Anyway. Stepney was once a toll station on the Bridgeport-Newtown Turnpike (now known as Route 25.) There's a plaque near this building which says:

Stepney
1801
Bridgeport / Newtown Turnpike
The forerunner of CT Route 25. Five toll stations were located along this road. Travelers would be stopped by a pole or “pike” across the road attached to a base. Upon paying a few cents toll the attendant would turn the pike allowing the travellers to continue, thus the name “turnpike.” This turnpike was a catalyst for Stepney’s commercial growth & for moving goods from Bridgeport to Danbury.

It was placed there by the Save Our Stepney Task Force. Of course it was.

Monroe, Take Two, and Newtown

Ever since I found one of Monroe's old schoolhouses by mistake, I've been meaning to go back and find the other one. This is it, the East Village Barn Hill Schoolhouse, now owned by the Monroe Historical Society. It dates from c. 1790.

Because there have been a few schoolhouses on the blog recently, I was going to wait to post this later in the winter. And then last Friday one of the worst school shootings in our nation's history took place just one town over.

I never intended for this blog to have anything to do with state or local news; there are plenty of other good sites for that. (See the "More Connecticut" thingy on the right of the page for a few of them.) But occasionally news gives me little choice.

I grew up about 40 minutes south of Newtown, in a town that's not the same (no two CT towns are) but is about the same size and often described with a lot of the same adjectives I keep hearing applied to Newtown on the news. I remember watching the attack at Columbine on TV and thinking, this is Fairfield County. Among my friends there was none of that "this can't happen here" stuff. We never thought of an elementary school, but we knew, back in 1999: This will happen here.

My mom worked at the high school I attended for years after I made my escape. I worried every day till she retired that some kid who, like me, had been failed or ignored or embittered by that place but who, unlike me, didn't have good parents and future goals and mental health, would decide that would be the day that school, and that town, would pay.

I photograph old school buildings because they're cute, the architectural equivalent of kittens, and also because I like the fact that so many have been preserved unintentionally, forgotten about or re-purposed or just left to fend for themselves.

They also seem, to someone who often feared going to school (though not for reasons of physical safety), so harmless compared to today's cold brick edifices. That's not to say that everything in the olden days was all happiness and lunch-pails, or that tragedies never unfolded within these small rooms. Just that I realized something on Friday about one-room schoolhouses, silly as it sounds: they look like places where the children of Connecticut were safe.

The Monroe...Something

I've never written about Monroe before, and I couldn't think of anything to call this post except The Monroe Doctrine, which seemed so obvious and cheesy and unrelated to the post's content that I decided I couldn't do it. But there's not really another catchy phrase with "Monroe" in it. So I gave up.

The reason I stopped to check out this building had nothing to do with what it is, or what it used to be, and only a little to do with the fact that it's all cute and historic-looking. I stopped because of the Mustard Seed sign over the door. Long ago, in a career far away, I once played a fairy in an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I remember my sparkly eyeshadow, and my black platform sandals from Payless, and I probably remember a lot of everyone else's lines, because Shakespeare has a way of taking up permanent residence in one's brain. But I have no idea which fairy I was. It could have been Mustard Seed. But then again it could have been Peaseblossom. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Cobweb, because that would have mildly terrified me. But I wasn't thinking about all that when I suddenly caught sight of this sign and turned around to see what the building was. It was just that something about "Mustard Seed" appealed to me.

It turns out the Mustard Seed Thrift Shoppe is owned by the Monroe Congregational Church, which is right next door and which is also a very pretty historic building - actually far more distinctive than this one, but I always prefer buildings that look like you could hitch them to your car and drive off with them in the night. The church was built in 1847, though there had been a meeting house on the Monroe (then New Stratford) Green since the 1700s.

The sign on the front says "Beardsley Hall," and under that, "Former Monroe Centre School, Circa 1830." And so another old schoolhouse finds me. The schoolhouse, according to the Church's website, was purchased at auction in 1935. It was used to expand the existing Beardsley Hall, dating from 1886, and if you walk around to the side you'll see that this is indeed part of a much larger building, and not really as tow-able as it appears from the front.

Unsurprisingly, I found out after I left Monroe that the town has another old schoolhouse, located very close to this one. Of course if I'd gone to Monroe with the intention of finding schoolhouses, I would have found that one but not this one. That's the Monroe Something, I guess.