Schools as related by Joseph Foulke
My earliest recollection of the schools which I attended was at Gwynedd meeting. There was no house for the purpose, but what was called the “little meeting house” was used. An old tottering man by the name of Samuel Evans was the teacher. The reading books were the Bible and the Testament; we had Dilworth’s spelling book, and Dilworth’s Assistant or arithmetic. Grammar was a thing hardly thought of; there was, however, a small part of the spelling book, called “a new guide to the English tongue,” and a few of the older pupils learned portions of this by rote, and would occasionally recite to the master, but the substance appeared to be equally obscure both to master and scholar.
My next schooling was in 1795, in the house, late the property of William Buzby, on the Bethlehem road, above the spring house. It was a kind of family school taught by Hannah Lukens. Here, Dr. Walton, of Stroudsburg, laid the foundation of his education. I went to Joshua Foulke, my father’s elder brother, an old man. He taught in a log schoolhouse near the eighteen-mile stone on the Bethlehem road. My father, with the help of his neighbors, built this house (about 1798) on a lot set apart for the purpose on the southern extremity of his premises. This log schoolhouse stood about thirty years, and beside Joshua Foulke, we had for teachers William Coggins, Hannah Foulke, Benjamin Albertson, Hugh Foulke (my brother), John Chamberlain, Christian Dull, Daniel Price, and Samuel Jones. I have probably not named all or given them in the order in which they came.[489]
Merion
Merion seems to have left no written records of educational activity. There is a possibility that Marmaduke Pardo[490] may have been connected with a school there, soon after his coming from Wales, but this is little better than a conjecture.[491] In the loft of the present building (which, however, does not date back so early as this study) there is a school room in which are rude tables and benches. One of them bears the date, 1711, rudely cut with a jackknife. If, in the early eighteenth century, the meeting house still sufficed for school, it is quite probable that the same was true much earlier; at any rate, no search thus far has revealed anything concerning an early schoolhouse. The Radnor Monthly Meeting Minutes in 1791 state:
School, at least not according to plan of yearly meeting
At Merion and Valley we have not discovered any progress in laying a foundation for schools in the way proposed by the yearly meeting.[492]
which would favor still further the idea that any school held there at that time was perhaps in the meeting house.
Horsham