Bethany Center School

On The Outside, Looking In
Bethany (Google Maps location)
May 2024

CT museum visit #516.

The other day an article about me and this very website was published across a slew of Connecticut online outlets. The “Hearst Media” ones. It was about a guy (me) who claims to have visited 515 (now 516) museums across the small state of Connecticut.

Eyebrows were raised, chuckles were chuckled. “No ways” were uttered.

So what did I do? I showed them all by “visiting” Bethany’s historic one-room Center Schoolhouse. It’s not open and no one guided me around. I simply walked around it and snapped a few pictures through the windows and called it a visit. Number 516, baby!

Yeah. It’s another one room schoolhouse, no different from the 15 or 20 others that dot the state. I’m not sure when this place is ever even open to random people like me. It is located in a traffic island of sorts at the town’s K-6 Bethany Community School. The Bethany Historical Society mentions it on their sparse website, but only in passing. Hey, did you know that Bethany is named for the Biblical village at the foot of the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem?

Me neither. I also didn’t know this little schoolhouse was functional from 1834 to 1934. One-hundred years! And when I checked it out, it had been nearly another hundred since it was retired! It was moved around Bethany a few times, and I like that it wound up here, in front of today’s elementary school. It just works.

From 1934 until 1951, it served as the first firehouse for Bethany’s volunteer fire department. Then it was moved and became the clubhouse for the Bethany Athletic Association until 1975 when it was moved to its current spot. Restoration began shortly thereafter.

Again, I can find no information on when or if it’s open to the public and as is tradition here at CTMQ, I didn’t go out of my way to find out. I’m sure it’s used often as a lesson of sorts to the students here at the “real” school. It’s a one-room schoolhouse. There are the two entrances at front; one for the boys and one for the girls. There’s the cloakroom and the wood burning stove and the slate board and the dunce cap and the uncomfortable desks.

The teachers got paid a pittance and had to be agile enough to teach illiterate six year olds and intelligent teenagers in the same room at the same time.

That’s the way it was across Bethany – and many other rural towns – into the 1930’s and even later.

And that’s all I’ve got. So to all those people curious about what I do and how in the world I visit and write about so many museums, I say, this is how I do it! By just making stuff up! Stick around for more!

Bethany Historical Society
CTMQ’s Museum Visits