Most of my readers know about Clara Barton. She was a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and in the last days of the war she devoted herself to finding lost soldiers and reuniting them with their families or letting the families know that they were dead. And, almost everyone knows that she founded the American Red Cross, which is still a vital relief corps and an advocate for health. But, Barton was born on Christmas Day in 1821. What did she do with her life in the thirty-nine years before the Civil War started? Among other roles, Barton was a schoolteacher who helped to found the public school concept in New Jersey. There is a site in Bordentown, New Jersey where you can visit her first public school in the state.
The Bordentown, New Jersey Clara Barton Schoolhouse was recently restored by the State of New Jersey and the Bordentown Historical Society. The building is located at 109 E Burlington St, Bordentown, NJ 08505. It is open only by appointment and you can call 609-298-1740 or email the Bordentown Historical Society at bordentownhistoricalsociety@gmail.com to be let into the building. However, even if you stop by without a reservation, you can see the entire inner space from the windows of the building. There are also historical signs explaining Barton’s role in education.
Barton began teaching school in her native Massachusetts when she was only 17 and she spent the next twelve years teaching near Oxford, Mass. For the time, Massachusetts had a robust system of public education. She also spent a year studying at the Clinton Liberal Institute, a Universalist seminary that trained ministers for Universalist congregations. In 1851 she was teaching in Hightstown, New Jersey next to Bordentown. She visited the town and found it lacking even basic schools. In 1852 she moved to Bordentown and set up the state’s widely acknowledged first public schoolhouse. The building where the school started is still standing.
The schoolhouse was built in 1839, thirteen years before Barton came to Bordentown, so it was a fairly new building. The building has been restored to what it looked like in 1921, when it was first restored. There is not enough documentation of the structure in 1852 to allow it to be historically restored to the era of when it was presided over by Barton, although the 1921 appearance of the building had been done by local citizens anxious to capture a Barton era look.
If you look at the interpretive sign below you can see what the building looked like before its 1921 restoration. The schoolhouse had been unused for several decades before and had fallen into disrepair. In 1920, it was sold to a family of philanthropists who thought that preserving the history of the founder of the American Red Cross was vital. The family sold the building to the State of New Jersey the following year for the nominal sum of one dollar to be restored and kept for the public for eternity. It was restored using money collected from schoolteachers and children from across New Jersey to mark both the creation of the New Jersey public school system and Clara Barton, who had died in 1912.
The funding effort in 1921 effort included a letter asking each schoolchild in New Jersey to donate one penny, approximately thirty cents in 2025 currency, to the effort. Teachers were asked to donate one nickel. The effort stopped the deterioration of the building and allowed the caretakers to restore it to its 1850s appearance.
Barton’s work started in 1852 with educating just six boys as her students at the publicly supported school. By the next year, 600 children had applied to be taught there. When a man was hired to be the principal at twice Barton’s salary she resigned. While Barton left because of gender discrimination, her efforts brought New Jersey into the modern era of public education in which even the poorest children could benefit.
Inside the school is a plaque erected in 1921 that says that the building “was restored by the school children of the state.” So many of these dedicatory plaques accord all honor to very rich donors, but this recognized the thousands of students who donated one penny. Your grandparents may have contributed.
In 2021, the current restoration was started with nearly $200,000 in state funds and local donations. Much of the work has been done, but the Society is still looking at putting up a restroom for visitors to the site. Updates are available here.
The interior is furnished with much of what a pre-Civil War schoolhouse would contain. None of the items come from the original Barton Schoolhouse, but it can be a useful stop to educated your children on how students in the 19th Century were educated.
As the school grew under Barton’s tutelage, a new building was opened to accommodate six hundred students and the 1837 building was abandoned. After the Civil War, two different Black families would make it their home for a half-a-century.
While the building is more than 180 years old, it is bright and colorful and you can imagine students learning in its seats.
The figure of Barton is seen inside the building as well as on the historical signage. This is a good site to educate children on the role of women during the Civil War Era, as well as the discrimination women suffered under. Barton was discriminated against here in New Jersey and she would suffers the same discrimination setting up nursing services in Washington just ten years later. This prejudice did not just hurt the women it was directed against. It also impacted poor schoolkids and wounded soldiers looking for care.
While the local historical society should look to open the schoolhouse during the summer without appointment needed, this is still worth a visit if you are along the Delaware River in Western New Jersey or in the nearby Philadelphia area.
