The Rock School

School of Rock
The Rock School, Colebrook (Google Maps location)
June 2024

Connecticut museum visit #519.

Here we are again. At yet another one-room school house museum. On the outside looking in.

And that’s fine. I came to a point in my decades-long adventure when I realized that there’s really no need to actually get inside every one of these preserved gems – especially in light of the fact that so many are so rarely open. I’ve “toured” about 15 of them and they’re all generally the same. And they’re all made up of only one room. And I seem to be able to get enough decent pictures through the windows to call it an official visit.

If you have a problem with that, and you want to take it up with the guy who have visited 518 Connecticut museums before this one, shoot me an email.

At the first town meeting held in Colebrook, held on December 13, 1779, the voters authorized two school districts – North and South. “The north is to go from the colony (state) line south as far as Capt. Samuel Rockwell’s. The south consisting of all Colebrook lands lying two miles north of the Winchester line.”

Did you catch that? It turns out The Rock Schoolhouse is not “just another one-room schoolhouse museum.” 1779! That predates Connecticut statehood by nine years! As far as can be determined, this is the only colonial era school in Connecticut that has never been modernized in any way; what the visitor today sees is essentially exactly the same that students saw the first year Colebrook was a town.

Wow, that’s cool.

The funny thing about a one-room schoolhouse in Colebrook is that in 2024, the town could probably be served fine with one. As it is, there is only one school in Colebrook and it serves Kindergarten through 6th grade. Want to guess how many students attended in 2024?

Seventy-two. That’s 10 kids per grade. That’s Colebrook. I seem to recall a bit of a kerfuffle in the recent past about our small towns’ maintaining schools for so few kids and Colebrook being top of the list. (Middle school and high schoolers are bused south to schools in Winsted.)

No, 72 kids can’t fit into The Rock School, but the 8 or 9 kindergartners could for sure. And why not? Make it a thing. “The last remaining active one-room schoolhouse in Connecticut! In New England? In the country?! I’m sure there are utilized ones in Alaska… in the continental US?!

I made my way north from the town’s quaint center to the school house. Let it be said that Colebrook is beautiful. If you’re going to get lost driving around a Connecticut town, you can do much worse than Colebrook. And, getting lost up here is a real possibility since it’s not like you’re getting bars on your phone here.

The Rock School served the kids in the north central part of Colebrook from 1779(!) until 1911. At that time, the population of the town had waned and there was a call for consolidation.

In 1920, the town voted to sell the Rock Schoolhouse. It remained in private hands until 1970, when the then owner, not having any plans for the building, and not wishing to pay taxes on it, suggested that perhaps the Historical Society would like it as a museum – if it could be moved to a new location.

Nancy Phelps Blum, long a mainstay of the Society, and whose ancestors had attended the school since the 18th century, donated the corner of her adjacent field, directly across the road from the school. After a successful fund-raising campaign, the Rock School building was moved to its present location on March 23, 1971, having remained in front of its namesake glacial boulder for 191 years.

The Colebrook Historical Society, upon deciding to make the school available to school groups, elected to restore the classroom to that of the late 1850s. Primarily this is due to the fact that there are individual seats and desks, whereas in the 1700s, benches were built in as an integral part of the building. The position of these benches can be seen today on the floor patterns.

Okay, I could not see the marks on the floor from the outside. But we can imagine them, right? Good.

It’s amazing that no modernization ever took place here. When it was privately owned, it was used as a summer cottage and no one felt the need to add electricity, plumbing, or water. And as a result, The Rock Schoolhouse has stood like a rock at the corner of Sandy Brook Road and Route 183 since a decade before George Washington became president.

Each year in Colebrook, the entire third grade – all 10 of ’em – spends a day here and aside from their Lunchables and the bus they arrive in, they experience the elementary school life of the past. The fact that every child can do this at the same time is pretty darn cool.

Now I kind of wish I got inside.

Colebrook Historical Society
CTMQ’s Museum Visits