Former student Vincent Hawley thankfully describes Richmond Hill School as a story with no end.
About 60 families had their history memorialized last month in the National Register of Historic Places as the 150-year-old Richmond Hill School was recognized as for its role in Silver Lake’s early education and Irish history.
Descendants of schoolhouse students celebrated its historic accomplishment on Oct. 13. Surviving archival records, including a diary from Richmond’s first teacher, date the school’s opening to late 1839 or early 1840, according to the Hawley family.
The 91-year-old believes he is the last living student from Richmond. He said he studied there from 1937 to 1942, when the school closed after the local population declined. The original building burnt down in 1862 and was rebuilt by 1870.
Hawley spent months restoring the schoolhouse after his father and brother bought the closed schoolhouse to keep the land from being used as hunting grounds. His family owns neighboring farmland to the schoolhouse.
The Susquehanna County native now lives in Johnson City, New York, but said he loves returning home to give people tours of his hometown.
“There's always a story or two that comes out of these open houses,” said Vincent Hawley. “This morning, some lady looked at this picture up behind me on the board [and] said, ‘Oh, that's my great aunt.’ And of course, everybody – probably you too – [knows] somebody [who] went to a one room country school. It wasn't this one, but they had the same stories.”
Most of the families in 1930s-40s Susquehanna were farmers, said Vincent Hawley. It “was hard work” and kids as young as eight worked from “sunup to sundown,” but that didn’t stop them from having fun.
He pointed out a bell on the teacher’s desk. His nieces found it in one of the Hawley family’s outhouses while he was doing restoration work. A memory of childhood mischief flooded back to him.
“My brother and I, when the school closed, we were still living here for the summer. We broke in. And it was easy to break into the school. We stole the bell,” Vincent Hawley admitted while laughing. “And then when we got home, we said, ‘What are we going to do with the bell? And what if my father sees that we stole the bell?’ So, we hid it in an outbuilding and totally forgot about it. And some 40 years later, they found it and brought it back.”
Vincent Hawley preserved the schoolhouse to match the only picture he could find from when the school was in operation. It was taken on Nov. 17, 1932 and is now replicated in Generation to Generation, a booklet he compiled based on archival research from the Susquehanna County Historical Society and community memory.
The road to national recognition
Vincent Hawley’s son, Daniel, led efforts to get the schoolhouse nationally recognized. He said the process took two years.
“I had written several articles for this historical society before, so I used some of my own stuff, but yeah, it took quite a bit of time. Newspapers, censuses, old records – Susquehanna County has some of the best records in the country,” said Daniel Hawley.
Getting national recognition wasn’t easy. Daniel Hawley had to work the school up the accolade ladder. He said the National Register of Historic Places views one-room schoolhouses “even if they're rare, [as not] necessarily significant.”
So, he started small. He got the school’s and township’s founder recognized by the Hometown Heritage Program, run by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. It recognizes “people, places, things or events that are historically significant to the larger community,” according to its website.
Robert H. Rose opened Richmond, originally named Silver Lake Schoolhouse No. 1, to attract settlers to work on his farmland, said Daniel Hawley.
“He advertised in Ireland in 1841, and maybe even before, about the good schools in Silver Lake. So, he recruited Irish, but this is the only case where [I] found that education was used to actually recruit immigrants,” said Daniel Hawley.
Rose advertised before the Potato Famine broke out in Ireland, which devastated millions of people.
“Pre-1850 [Silver Lake-area had] the most significant Irish settlement in the state,” said Daniel Hawley. “These were pre-famine immigrants, so a little bit better off than the starving immigrants that came after the potato famine. So, they came out here to farm, and then mostly brought their families, and they were very successful.”
Daniel Hawley boasted Rose’s movement helped the local Irish population go from around 15 percent literate to nearly 100 percent literate within a generation. Students came as young as four and some studied until they hit 20 years old, according to his archival research.
That focus on education was vital to the community’s future, added Vincent Hawley. He said Richmond’s children were incredibly important to their family’s success, as many families had immigrated to Silver Lake from Ireland and later Eastern Europe during World War I. The eldest child of immigrants often became their parents’ translator.
“The eighth grader was taking care of all the paperwork, because they're the only one that knew English,” said Vincent Hawley. “And that made the school very important to the family as well … they had to get somebody to be able to interface with the world.”
Daniel Hawley used Rose’s plaque and the Hawley family’s combined research to make a case to the National Register of Historic Places. Instead of focusing on the building’s structure, he highlighted the school’s role in Silver Lake’s early education and Irish history. The school’s registration protects it from being torn down by future development in the area.
Richmond Hill School is located at 1340 Wilkes-Barre Turnpike, Montrose, Pa 18801.
