The idea of starting your freshman year of high school in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by kids you haven’t met before, can be a nerve-wracking thought. But at a close-knit place like New Salem Academy, it wasn’t long before you knew every classmate.
By the time I entered New Salem Academy in 1954, my two older brothers and sister who had all attended the school gave me a good idea of what to expect. Plus, there were plenty of other Warwick kids who would be making the change with me, including Martha (Hubbard) Alden, who I’d been friends with since first grade.
At that time, once you finished grade school in Warwick, you were bused to either New Salem or Orange to attend high school. New Salem Academy welcomed students from Warwick, Wendell, Athol, Orange, Barre, Shutesbury, Leverett and, in its earlier days, even students from the towns in the Quabbin Reservoir prior to their being flooded.
Even with kids coming from so many towns, a freshman class might have 35 or 40 students, making it easy to get to know everyone. By the time graduation came, if you had 20 kids left, you were part of an unusually big class.
There were only four rooms in the main academy building, with the biggest room — the freshman classroom — also doubling as an assembly hall. There was often a class going on where you were having a study hall, so you had to hone your ability to focus.
Tuesday mornings offered some of the most fun, as it was when the music teacher came for Glee Club. There was also the option to join the French Club or participate in basketball or baseball, for which New Salem Academy had especially good teams.
There were also three surrounding buildings for “aggie” classes, the machine shop and home economics, which I found particularly useful. Eunice Fiske taught us how to can, knit, sew and crochet, as well as proper etiquette. Like the teaching of shorthand, these are skills that aren’t emphasized in modern schools.
Of course, I learned some of these skills at home, too, where there were always opportunities to help. Each day, when you came home from school, you changed out of your school clothes and helped with chores, like hauling in firewood. Back then, everyone had a cow, and your own chickens so you could have fresh eggs. Dad grew all the potatoes we needed, and my mother had big gardens and canned everything.
Because I got married my junior year, I didn’t graduate with New Salem Academy Class of 1958. But I credit Lillian Gardner’s business class with giving me the skills I needed to help my husband, George Hunt, run our Hunt Farm in Orange for so many years. We are now retired, and the farm is run by our son and grandson.
New Salem Academy, which graduated its first class in 1913, saw its final class in 1968. After that, Ralph C. Mahar Regional High School worked out a lease with the academy’s trustees to use one of the academy’s four buildings to teach its automotive students. In its last evolution as a teaching institution, in 1983, it became a private school for a few years before closing for financial reasons.
Today, much of what was formerly the academy is private residences, though there is also a New Salem Academy museum. It was with the same interest of keeping the school’s memory alive that, between 1986 and 2016, I helped my fellow classmates and teachers organize an annual dinner dance as a reunion at the Orange Elks Lodge.
Organizing the dinner dances — which were the idea of Lois (Carey) Coffin, Class of 1952 — was a great joy to me. When we first started doing it, we would send out more than 800 letters. Lillian Gardner helped us dig up addresses for the alumni, and we’d get our husbands involved with prepping letters. There’d be 10 or 12 people at our little work bees, so we’d do a potluck and make a fun time of it.
At our first dinner dance, we had more than 400 alumni and faculty. The alumni were really interested, with some showing up in great numbers and traveling from far away to celebrate their graduation year, and some showing up every year. By the time of our last dinner dance, with fewer surviving alumni each year, we had 78 attendees.
Though many of my former classmates are gone now, it’s a small world out there. I still see some of them around Franklin County and stop to reminisce, like Eleanor McGinnis, Class of 1957, who wrote a book with Steven Blinder about the academy’s history, and members of the trustees, who oversee the museum today.