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Compiled by James Krauss, Webmaster
There is evidence that education in Woodbury dates back to colonial times.
A notice found in the Pennsylvania Gazette of 1744 states that a teacher
by the name of Timothy Kenny was located in Woodbury. “All persons
indebted to the estate of Timothy Kenny (schoolmaster) late of Gloucester
County deceased, are desired to pay their respective debts to John Snowden
or John Wilkins of Woodbury…”(Tercentenary Committee)
The first schoolhouse, the Deptford School, was erected in Woodbury in 1774
by the Deptford Free School Society, which was formed in October of 1773 by
a group of prominent Friends (Society of Friends) and later known as the Deptford
Institute. Located on Delaware Street, it was open to all denominations on
the condition of payment of tuition and adherence to the school’s rules,
as laid down by the controlling Society of Friends. The first teacher was a
man by the name of Jeremiah Paul and the first trustees were: Joseph Low, David
Cooper, John Brown, Jeb Whitall, Mark Miller, Arron Hewes and James Whitall.
A second story was added in 1820 as a result of a $500 bequest by James Cooper.
Remodeled in 1863, the Woodbury City Hall currently occupies the building,
which once housed the school. The mission of the school was “educational,
moral and charitable.” It continued to operate until 1889, seventeen
years after the City of Woodbury was incorporated. The school was totally disbanded
in 1893.
The Woodbury Academy, built in 1791 with funds raised by the common practice of lottery, was located at the northeast corner of South Broad and Center Streets, the site of the former Woolworth’s. The land was deeded in trust to several
prominent Gloucester County men “for the sole purpose of building an
Academy upon” by Joseph Bloomfield, Governor of New Jersey from 1803
to 1812. The Reverend Andrew Hunter, Jr., one of the trustees, also served
as the Academy’s first teacher-principal. The normal number of students
in attendance during the Academy’s first few decades was twenty. On weekends,
when the school was not in session, the one-room schoolhouse was used by the
Presbyterians as a house of worship.
Captain James Laurence, of “Don’t Give Up the Ship” fame,
was educated at the Woodbury Academy, as was Commodore Stephen Decatur, who
then lived in Westville.
In 1820 a second floor was added to the Academy. The Presbyterians who had
been granted permission a year earlier by the Academy’s trustees to use
the first floor as a church “so long as the present building shall stand,” remodeled
the first floor as a church. The Episcopalians too occasionally used the first
floor as a house of worship. The Presbyterians continued to use it until 1834
when they built a church across the street, where it is presently located.
The upper room of the Academy was under the care of the Woodbury Academy Association,
which continued to hire the teacher and make the rules governing the teacher
and pupils. Unfortunately, the difficulty then, before the day of State appropriation,
was how to raise sufficient funds to maintain the Academy.
After over a half century of service, the school began to fail for lack of
funds and in 1844 was advertised for public sale by the Sheriff’s Office.
The Academy was sold to John B. Harrison, a Presbyterian, for $170 who in turn
resold it to the Trustees of the Presbyterian Church for $100.
In January of 1846, the upper room of the Academy was rented to the Sons of
Temperance for two years at $30 a year. An anteroom of some twelve feet in
width at the head of the stairs was reserved by the Church Trustees for their
schoolroom.
In November of 1863, the trustees of the Presbyterian Church appointed a committee
to negotiate the sale of the Academy to the school district embracing the Borough
of Woodbury, The Public School District No. 7 of the Township of Deptford comprising
all of Woodbury South of the creek. The price, excluding the sale of the bell
which the Presbyterians determined to keep, was $1500. On March 25,1864, the
transaction was consummated with the School District No. 7, then incorporated
as the Woodbury Free School.
In 1865, William Milligan, who then had been teaching six years at the Oak
Street School built in 1856, was appointed the Academy’s teacher-principal.
He remained in Woodbury until his death in 1897 serving as City Superintendent
and was elected Superintendent of the Gloucester County Public Schools in 1867,
devoting two to three days a week to that office during the time he held the
City Superintendency.
By 1877, it had become evident that the Oak Street School (an addition had
been built shortly after it was constructed), the Academy (an addition had
been built in 1865), and the one-room “Black School” which was
located in the parish house of the Bethel African Methodist-Episcopal Church
in South Woodbury on Carpenter Street, were all insufficient to house the expanding
school population.
As a result of the $10,000 bonding authorization and approval of the voters,
a new school was constructed in 1879 in the rear of the old Academy at East
Center and South Broad Streets. The old Academy was sold at public action for
$62.50 with the buyer’s intent to move and use the old Academy as a Republican
Clubhouse. The brown frame building proved too problematical to move and was
razed, piece by piece, with some of the lumber going into homes in the Franklin
Street area which were then under construction. The new school continued to
be called the “Academy” until it too was demolished in 1925.
The new “Academy” graduated the first class of Woodbury High School
in 1903, consisting of four students. Prior to 1899, when the High School was
established, the 10th grade was the highest grade level in Woodbury’s
school system.
In 1881, two additional school rooms in the apartments across the street from
the Bethel African Methodist-Episcopal Church were obtained by the District
to house the expanding black student population which had since 1840 used the
Church’s parish house.
Before all the bonds issued to pay for the new Academy were liquidated, there
was still a need for more rooms. School District No. 1 consisted of all the
land in Woodbury and part of Deptford and West Deptford Townships; there were
many complaints about the distance small children had to travel to reach the
Academy. The trustees at the annual meeting in 1888, in the Town Hall in Woodbury,
unanimously granted the authority to bond the District $15,000 to build two
four-room schoolhouses, one at West End and one near Walnut Street in North
Woodbury.
The dilapidated Oak Street School was replaced in 1889 by the present Walnut
Street School on land then bonded by Oak and Chestnut Streets and purchased
for $1,600. At the same time, the now abandoned West End School, now used by
the Woodbury Sketch Club, was erected on a site bound by Glover, Morris and
Logan Streets. Franklin Pierce Reynolds, who built the Kemble Methodist-Episcopal
Church and the First National Bank building in Woodbury, built both schools.
Woodbury’s first high school, located at its present site, was named
the William Milligan High School after the District’s and County’s
first Superintendent who had given nearly forty years of his life to the education
of Woodbury’s youth. The school, authorized in 1908, was completed in
late 1909. Shortly after 5:00 a.m. on December 19, 1910, a fire enveloped the
newly constructed school burning the $73,000 structure to the ground. Only
the outer walls were left standing.
Rebuilt in 1911 with the then Governor and future President, Woodrow Wilson,
laying the cornerstone, it was renamed the Woodbury High School and served
grades 9 through 12. During the interim, students attended classes in the Merritt
Building at the northeast corner of Cooper and Broad Streets and in Green’s
Block at the southeast corner of Broad and Center Streets.
It was in 1915, when the Carpenter Street School was being built to house the
expanding black student population that another serious fire broke out in the
high school. Fortunately the fire companies were able to extinguish the blaze.
The Carpenter Street School housed grades k-8 and was built in two stages,
the first in 1915 and the second a few years later. This school was closed
in the early sixties when the district integrated its k-8 schools.
An auditorium and the now defunct Central School were added to the high school
in 1926.
The West End Memorial School, bounded by Queen, Jackson and Logan Streets was
dedicated in 1950 as a replacement for the deteriorating West End School. The
Evergreen School, located on Evergreen Avenue, was dedicated four years later.
The new high school gymnasium, Junior High School Annex (currently used to
house the District’s sixth graders) and additions to all elementary schools – Evergreen, Walnut and West End Memorial – were completed in 1957. This construction
was closely followed by the addition of a new kitchen and high school cafeteria
in 1960. In 1968, a new wing was added to the high school containing a home
economics suite, science rooms and the current Junior-Senior High School’s
library.
In the year 2000 another construction project began. Additions were made to
Evergreen Avenue School and West End Memorial School. Furthermore, in 2000,
a new cafeteria and lobby were added to the Junior-Senior High school. On December
14, 2004 the citizens of Woodbury approved a bond referendum for repairs and
an upgrade to the district buildings and land that included auditorium renovations,
new floors on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the High School, a new phone system
and a wide area network between the schools, new geothermal HVAC in all the
schools and repairs and renovations to the high school stadium.
Since 1863, there have been twenty-three superintendents of schools including
the present superintendent. The last seven of whom were Dr. Warren J. McClain,
Dr. Donald E. Beineman, Irving Arbo, Dr. Claudio E. Arrington, Dr. Craig Berry,
Mrs, Judith Wilson, and our current superintendent Joseph Jones, III. It was
during Dr. McClain’s superintendency that the sending District of Deptford
built its own high school and its students left in 1957. The sending districts
of Wenonah, National Park, Woodbury Heights and Westville then bonded together
to build Gateway Regional High School In 1965.
Woodbury Public Schools now exists as a small PreK through grade 12 school
district, serving the citizens of the City of Woodbury, carrying on a long
history of quality education for the youth of Woodbury. Now in 2008 the citizens
of Woodbury look back at their long history with nostalgia and forward with
optimism because of the long tradition of quality education that the Woodbury
Public Schools continues to offer its students.
Works Cited:
Author Unknown. "History of Public Education in Woodbury".
1988.
Woodbury Tercentenary Committee.Historic Woodbury. 1964.
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