3. To approve masters, retire them, and fill vacancies.
4. Through trustees or committees on funds, (a) to finance the education of poor children, (b) to pay salaries, (c) to build school houses, and (d) to establish permanent endowments.
5. To take final reports to be sent to the yearly meeting.
Three points indicated concerning the organization
These functions have all been brought to the reader’s attention by reports and minutes quoted in chapters on the schools in various counties. This brief presentation of the organization and direction on the part of the meetings should be sufficient to point out: (1) that the general nature of the organization is a hierarchy of units; (2) that the direction of school activities comes from the higher to the lower, and is of a general and suggestive rather than specific and mandatory nature; (3) that the monthly meeting formed the real working unit, and that on its diligence probably depended the welfare of the preparatives’ schools. We shall now attend for a moment to a few of the details of the school in so far as we may judge them from the records at our disposal.
THE SCHOOL
Permanent properties recommended for schools
Property acquired by Philadelphia schools and meeting
and Abington
It has already been mentioned that one of the yearly meeting’s earnest recommendations was that a lot of ground be provided where schools might be necessary, sufficient for a garden, orchard, grass for a cow, etc., and that a suitable house and stables and other necessary things be arranged for the securing of more permanent and better qualified teachers.[796] There were certainly several of the meetings where land for the purposes of schools was possessed before these recommendations were made. Notable instances, which may be mentioned, were Philadelphia and Abington, and many others, who early secured permanent lands for the meeting which were also used for the erection of schools. Some of the early acquisitions of school property in Philadelphia were: (1) that purchased in 1698 of Lionell Brittain;[797] (2) another deeded by John Goodson and Thomas Lightfoot to the overseers;[798] and (3) that devised by William Forrest, upon which the overseers erected a school in 1744.[799] There was also the piece of ground left to the monthly meeting of that place by George Fox, upon which the meeting gave permission for the building of a school, free from ground rent.[800] The property gained by Abington in 1696 was for the support of a school.[801] A meeting house was erected on the land between 1696 and 1700. These cases of endowment directly for schools were very limited as to locality at the early part of the eighteenth century. Their number increased in later years, and the increase may have been due partly to the influence of the yearly meeting’s urgent advices.