Westport still has a 1-room schoolhouse.
It’s not used anymore — but Marguerite Webb’s photo of a handsome part of the old building was last week’s Photo Challenge.
The school is Adams Academy, on North Morningside Drive. Madison Malin, Jacques Voris and Mary Palmieri Gai were the “06880” readers who identified it.
The town of Westport now owns the Greek Revival structure, which has official historic designation.
As well it should. From 1837 to 1867, the magnificently named Ebenezer Adams ran an eponymous coed prep school there. During his tenure, 637 students graduated. None were refused admission to college.
In 1868, Adams sold his academy and its 1-acre property to the Green’s Farms Association. They operated the school — less successfully — for the next 14 years.
A bank foreclosed the mortgage in 1882. Wealthy Long Lots resident Robert Martin bought it. The West Long Lots school district operated it as a public school until 1898.
It later became the home of grades 1-3, for the consolidated West Long Lots, East Long Lots and Green’s Farms districts.
The academy was abandoned in 1917, shortly before Greens Farms Elementary School opened on South Morningside.
It’s been used as a town park, a home for the needy, offices for the town guidance department, and headquarters for the Westport Historical Society.
Now restored, it is one of our town’s most hidden — and historic — treasures.
(Click here for last week’s Photo Challenge. Thank you, Woody Klein, for that background information. To learn more about Adams Academy, click here.)
Patricia McMahon provides this week’s Photo Challenge. It’s a gorgeous image, and very intriguing.
(Photo/Patricia McMahon)
If you know where in Westport you’d find this, click “Comments” below.
