School Days of Calvin Coolidge

What follows is an excerpt from the book, Return to These Hills: The Vermont Years of Calvin Coolidge. Since we pass through Ludlow frequently on our way to Mile Square Farm, we found this to be a fascinating peek into history. So, perhaps "Father does know best!"

" The winter Calvin was thirteen years old, he had finished his studies at the stone school house. For many children that was all the education they would ever have. Most hill country families needed their labor and any wages they could earn. Calvin's father wanted his children to have at least some terms at his old school, Black River Academy. Of course it meant a long trip of twelve miles down to Ludlow and then there was the tuition as well as the board to consider. It would be about $7 a term for the school, and board and room would probably be another $3 a week, around $150 for a year. But John Coolidge considered Calvin's education a good investment, so on a bitterly cold morning in February in 1886 the little household arose at 5 a.m. to see Calvin off on his first great adventure. He was dressed in his "good" clothes, his two small handbags in the back of the sleigh along with a calf bound for the Boston market. John Coolidge's words of advice to his son as he left home on his own for the first time were, 'Calvin, if you study hard and are a good boy, maybe sometime you'll go to Boston too, but the calf will get there first.' Calvin never forgot how he felt that first morning. The memories of it flooded over him whenever he started out on a new enterprise, particularly the morning when he left Plymouth for the White House. 'Going to the Academy meant a complete break with the past and entering a new and untried field, larger and more alluring than the past, among unknown scenes and unknown people.'"

"The three story building (Black River Academy) from which he graduated still stands in its Victorian monumentality in the middle of Ludlow, a small manufacturing town. Although he spoke afterward about the excitement of the new scenes, to be lifted so abruptly from his small familiar life in the Notch, must have been a shock."

Source:  Return to These Hills : The Vermont Years of Calvin Coolidge, Jane Curtis, Will Curtis, Frank Lieberman, Woodstock, VT: Curtis-Lieberman Books, 1985.