Washington, Aug. 4.—Editor of Inter Ocean: In reply to your inquiry of the 17th ult., I have to state that this office is unable to say what time will elapse before the Omaha Indian Reservation, in Nebraska, will be open to settlement. The requirements of the act of Aug. 7, 1882, as to appraisement, have not yet been fully complied with, and these lands are still under the jurisdiction of the Office of Indian Affairs. Yours respectfully,
Luther Harrison,
Acting Commissioner.
The substance of the act above referred to is given in Our Curiosity Shop for 1882, pages 113 and 128.
FIRST AMERICAN FREE SCHOOLS.
Douglass, Kan.
Where and in what year were free schools first established in this country? Who was the first advocate of them? When did they become general?
Henry Butler.
Answer.—A law was passed in Massachusetts in 1649 requiring every township to maintain a free school, and every town of 100 families to maintain a grammar school to “fit youths for the university;” and it is recorded in 1665 that a free school was then supported by each town in New England. The Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven Colonies soon followed this good example of Massachusetts, either in whole or in part. The first public school in Pennsylvania was established in Philadelphia by the Quakers, in 1689, free to those who could not pay. In 1694 Maryland enacted that every county should have a public school, and every parish a free library of at least fifty volumes. A free grammar school was established in New York by an act passed in 1702, but a system of free common schools was not inaugurated in this State until after 1795, in which year, on the recommendation of Governor Clinton, the Legislature appropriated $50,000 to encourage the establishment of common schools—not wholly free. It was years after this before the system of schools free to all (except colored children) went into general operation in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. The Southern States waited until after the war before adopting the free-school system even for white children. Their common schools were free only for the children of confessed paupers. Who was “the first advocate” of free schools it is now impossible to determine positively. Several of them came over in the Mayflower, as there were a few free schools in Massachusetts before the above enactment of 1649, making it obligatory on every town to have them, the chief argument then being that “every child must know how to read the Bible.”