Out of respect for the events at the Boston Marathon on Patriots Day, it didn't seem right to start telling the tale of the first school in the United States, located there. Time passed and the same feeling applied to the connection I found to Cleveland Ohio. So it seems like I'd better just log in and say hello until a little later on.
For now: I began looking for a Jenny H. Stickney shortly after starting this blog. She had authored or edited some readers for various aged groups, translated tales like 'Swiss Family Robinson' from their original languages, and compiled some wonderful illustrated story books. In one of her introductions she speaks of how the story gets changed, often for the worse, by spectacular publications. I guess not much has changed in that regard. Her first publication was a Teachers Manual for Bartholomew's Drawing Cards. This lead me to London, where the illustrator of some of her books was legendary.
In the family ancestry book, I did find a couple of Stickney teachers, but only Jenny H I found would have been about 5 years old when author/teacher Jenny H began her publishing.
The first American school located in Boston was modeled on a school in the ancestral Stickney area in England. That sent me on a whole new search. Jenny H Stickney got married to someone named Lansing, and copies of her books are scattered in educational library collections all the way to California.
Somewhere along the line the Cleveland connection showed up, and alas, that could be England instead of Ohio also. Our American Cleveland was originally spelled Cleaveland after the first Mayor General Moses Cleaveland. They changed the spelling so that the city name would fit on the top of the newsprint banner when they began their first newspaper.
Even Ben Franklin stuck his nose in all this. Apparently, it was common practice to get books from Europe and reset them for printing here. His characteristically clever thoughts on the practice of starting kids off on Latin and Greek are in his Autobiography, and I think I noted the page. Hopefully, I'll get my act in gear and tell this tale soon. But I may never figure out where Jenny H Stickney lived, married, taught, and wrote. But I can say this about her. She's been dead over a hundred years and she's still teaching. She deserves a posthumous award.
