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School #1 in Conesus NY in 1939.

Photo courtesy of William and Betty White Greene.

School #1 in Conesus NY

Located at Foots Corners in Conesus NY.

Livonia Gazette

4 July 1940

By Ruth Strong Mulvaney

School District Number 1 is, I believe, the oldest in the town of Conesus, dating from the year 1810.

It was nearly twenty years after the first settlement of the town in 1793 that the pioneers, realizing the necessity of preparing a school to educate their young, built the first log school house in the year 1810, and established Miss Polly Howe, who later became Mrs. Joshua Gills, as teacher. This first log building was situated just north of the farm home of John D. Alger, known in later years as the Wm. Jerome farm, now owned by John A. Alger of Conesus.

This school was soon after moved to a site about 100 rods northeast of the home of the late J. A. Clark, and located upon the old road leading from Foote’s Corners to Turkey Hill, and extending, in early years, on to Conesus Lake. A pile of stones, which was the old stone chimney, is still visible in the pasture lot of the farm now owned by Mrs. F. E. Worden of Dansville, sister of Mr. Clark.

On March 19, 1823, the district was organized by James King, Andrew Arnold and Benjamin C. Whitney as school commissioners. In the year 1829 the present site, a few rods north of Foote’s Corners, was acquired and the following year the old log school house was moved upon it. A few years later this building was razed and a frame building was erected and painted red, the popular color for schools in those days, which building stood until 1869. This red school house was bought by Franklyn Foote and moved first on the west side of the now state road, and later across the road near the farm house, where it still stands, the property of the present owner of the Foote homestead, Floyd Halsted.

The red school house was succeeded by the present one, which was built by Contractor A. Keys during the summer of 1869 and remained on site until the summer of 1930. That summer it was necessary for the state to raise the bridge over the railroad, and because of the necessity of grading, widening the road, etc., the building was moved a few rods to the east, where it still stands.

The following summer after the present Foote’s Corners school house was built, Mr. Keys built a two-story building for District No. 4 in the village of Conesus. From then on there was much rivalry between the two schools. The Conesus Center school had an attendance of about eighty pupils during the winter term, with two teachers and two rooms, and Foote’s Corners about sixty pupils with one teacher in the one room. The attendance in later years at District No. 1 was: In 1912, eight to ten pupils; from 1930 to 1939, thirty to thirty-five pupils; and in 1939 about twelve to fifteen pupils.

Early teachers were: V. T. Clark, L. C. Partridge, O. W. Morris, Miss McNaughton and Miss Ferris. Later teachers were: Mrs. John Coe, Miss Ferry (now widow of John Sharp), Ruth Strong, Miss Sarah Walkley (later Mrs. Paul Boyd), Miss Sue Webster, Miss Edith Sliker, and Mrs. Irene Ward Williams.

Among the big boys and girls in the earlier years were R. W. and Eugene Cole, John McVicar, Rodney Sherwood, James Alger, the Waden brothers, the Rowland brothers and sisters, Carrie Thorp, Jennie Baker, the Bearss girls, the Crego sisters, and the Polands.

Some of the later trustees were, from 1912 on: Bennett Boyd, Geo. Stevens, L. S. Morris, Geo. Sylvester, Perley Friot, Fred Henty, Ed. Mulvaney and Floyd Halsted.

The last teacher, Mrs. Williams, taught for eleven consecutive years, from 1928 to 1939, at which time the district, at the regular school meeting, voted to close the district school and it became absorbed by the Livonia Central school.