To rescue from oblivion the name and services of Master Gibson, a worthy school-master of the days of yore, is the object of the present chapter.

The picturesque eminence, the site of the Grove church and schoolhouse, and the cemetery, comprising in all two acres, was the donation of Amos Wickersham to John Simpson and others, trustees for a church, school-house, and burial place, in 1776. In shape it was a parallelogram carved out of the hundred-acre tract, afterwards the farm of Daniel Frazer, which bounded it on three sides, the fourth being the farm of Gen. Montgomery, extending thence to the river.

The three-fold but congruous purpose to which that beautiful and prominent eminence was appropriated-for a house of christian worship; for a God’s acre, a place of sepulture, where the forefathers of the village sleep the sleep which knows no terrestrial awakening; and for a place of learning, where the children of the adventurous founders of the settlement would acquire the elements of an education to qualify them to become useful and respectable members of society. This union gave to this venerated spot a sacred character, which all future time cannot fail to cherish, respect, and honor.

The old log school-house was built about 1785, probably two years anterior to the erection of the old Presbyterian church edifice, and was thirty yards east of it. It was a most unpretentious building; the logs were not even “rough hewn.” It was twenty feet square, one story, and that of only sufficient height to allow the teacher to stand erect. An only door, fronting the church, afforded means of ingress and egress. The chimney was at the opposite end, and admitted fuel eight or ten feet long, whereby rousing fires were maintained on cold winter days. A window at either side, two or three times the width of its height, admitted light. There was a rude puncheon floor, and the seats were of the same material. Desks were made of a single board along the sides, so as to enable the student to face the window, and afforded facilities for writing to the more advanced students.

This rude structure, and the church hard by, had a vigorous and flourishing grove of primitive forest trees around them, which were of much protection in shielding them from the summer’s heat and winter’s cold.. Their luxuriant foliage was pleasing to the eye and gratifying to the taste of the admirer of natural scenery. It is to be regretted that the absence of groves immediately around such buildings should prevail to so large an extent in this enlightened age. The poet tells us “the groves were God’s first temples,” but we show very little appreciation of them.

For a few years, this rustic school-house was occupied by schoolmasters and their little schools of twenty scholars. The teachers were without families, and, as the custom of that day was, boarded around with their employers in rotation, thus getting remuneration, in part, for the tuition. At that primitive day, this was a convenient arrangement for both parties. Tradition fails to hand down to us the names of these peripatetic pedagogues. During the most of the decade following, up to the close of the last century, Master Gibson, “the village master, taught his little school,” but, unlike his predecessors, he had a family, and did not make his home with his patrons. Of this worthy, traditionary history affords us many interesting particulars; quite as many as could be expected through so unreliable a medium, after the lapse of a century. He was probably a Scot, like his successor, but he may have been a countryman of Goldsmith’s, possibly the original from which the character in his celebrated poem was drawn,

Many anecdotes verify this. At that period the opinion prevailed that a boy with a large head was a blockhead. One of the boys-no favorite with the master-=had a capacious head, and nicknamed “chuckle-head;” to ridicule the boy’s great caput, the master wrote in his copy-book for him to copy, “Big head, little wit,” which the boy copied, adding “Little head, less yet.” Surprised at this retort, the master very discreetly passed by the offense in silence lest he should publish his own discomfiture. The copies for writing were all written by the master in a legible hand, and generally in rhyme. These are examples:

The books used in his school, were the New England Primer, embellished with a quaint likeness of the Honorable John Hancock, Esq., President of the American Congress, and numerous wood-cuts of rude appearance; Dilworth’s Spelling Book, Fenning’s Spelling Book and New Guide to the English tongue, Dilworth’s Arithmetic, a useful book entitled The Young Man’s Companion, a kind of sequel to the others, well calculated to qualify the older boys for business. Those more advanced read the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goldsmith’s Histories abridged. In this brief course, many of the pupils were very thorough, and acquired a good practical education which would compare, not unfavorably, with that obtained in the common schools of to-day. Owing to the multiplicity of studies in the latter, many of the scholars attain only an imperfect and superficial knowledge of the course of study taught in them.

During the time Mr. Gibson taught in this school he was quite successful, and the size of his school was much larger than of his predecessors. His pay was by voluntary subscription. For the smaller scholars, he received eleven shillings three pence, for the larger ones, fifteen shillings, Pennsylvania currency, per quarter, of three months, equivalent to $r 5o and $z oo Federal money, as it was then termed.

During his mastership, most of the leading citizens contributed to the support of the school. Legendary history has preserved the names of the following patrons of the school: Gen. William Montgomery, John Montgomery, John Sechler, John Frazer, Daniel Frazer, Thomas Osborne, William Sheriff, Thomas Stevenson, John Gulick, George McCulley, Edward Morrison, Murdo Morrison, John Simpson, Paul Adams, John Evans, Philip Maus, Joshua Halleck, John and James Emmitt, Alexander, Ewing, Dr. Forest, John Hill, and the Sanders, the Blues, the Moores, the Woodsides, the Cornelisons, the Colts.

The pupils, as has been stated, attended school only about one fourth of the year, few of them for more than two or three winters; at different periods they were John, Jacob, Samuel, and Harmon Sechler, Archibald, John, James, and Robert Woodside, Jacob, Isaac, James, Ann, and Mary Cornelison, Jesse Simpson, Mary, Margaret, and Charles M. Frazer, and their cousin Charles Frazer, Samuel and John Huntington, Isaac, Peter, Samuel, and John Blue, Asa, Samuel, and Charles Moore, Able, Josiah, Griffith, and William Phillips, Joseph and Jacob W. Maus, Charles Evans, John McCoy, Jefferson and Robert Montgomery, from Tennessee. Except the Frazers’s, Sechler’s, and Montgomery’s, the pupils were too remote from the school to’go home for dinner, and were obliged to bring their dinners with them. There was but one intermission during the day, from twelve to one o’clock, but the students were permitted to withdraw one at a time. A triangular block about the size of a spelling book with the word in painted on one side, and out on the other, suspended to a nail on the back of the door; the student going out turned the out to the school, and on his return the in, when another might enjoy the same privilege.

The fuel for the school was supplied from the windfalls in the two-acre lot, and was chopped by the school boys. During the noon hour, they amused themselves by swings formed by bending down the small saplings, by quoits, shindy, ball, running, jumping, and wrestling. Marbles and kites had not yet reached the rural settlement, and they were rare thirty years subsequently.
If the temperature permitted sugar-making in February, many of the larger boys left the school to engage in it before the expiry of their three months’ study. The demand for labor at home often shortened the term of study at school, and the want of the fifteen shillings for the payment of tuition not unfrequently forbade their attendance for the winter.

Mr. Gibson was the last teacher in the old log school-house. General Montgomery having donated a lot in his plat of Danville, west of Mill street and north of Market street, in 18o2, a new frame school-house was erected. Mr. Andrew Forsyth, eminent for his scholastic acquirements and his virtues, became, principal of the school. He was succeeded by Mr. John Moore, who afterward became one of the principal merchants of the place. Mr. Thomas W. Bell, the skillful penman, was the next instructor; and he was succeeded by Colonel Don Carlos Barrett, the most popular and successful educator that ever presided over the school. He subsequently became an eminent lawyer and statesman in Texas, and, with Austin and Huston, constituted the triumvirate, with dictatorial powers, during the Texan Revolution. After him came Samuel Kirkham, the distinguished and successful grammarian ; and after him, Ellis Hughes, a cultured and most competent teacher. Simultaneously with these latter, were John Richards, Thomas Grier, and Stephen Half. Soon after, the public schools superseded the private institutions, and their history can be traced up more satisfactorily than that of the latter, left almost wholly to tradition, not always reliable.

Master Gibson taught seven or eight winters. He was a rigid disciplinarian, with European ideas of control of his school, and, without hesitancy, used the birch freely, in accordance with the precept of the wise king. Nevertheless, he was honored and revered by his pupils. He was a good and useful man in his day and generation. Little is now known of his family. The writer met his daughter in 1822, then the wife of a respectable farmer on the Chillisquaque.
The last survivor of Master Gibson’s pupils has recently passed away. The venerable Jacob Sechler, one of the first white children born in Danville, and a nonogenarian, died on Christmas day, 1880. A year or two since, Mr. George S. Walker, with courteous civility, submitted to him the data from which this notice was written, and he stated they were substantially correct, but, from impaired memory, he could give no further facts whereby the account could be rendered more perfect.

SOURCE:  Page(s) 25-29; Danville, Montour County Pennsylvania; D.H.B. Brower, Harrisburg; 1881

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