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Baltimore County:
Historical Reflections and Favorite Scenes
Public Buildings
Maryland was a wilderness in the 17th century, and although wealthy planters could afford to hire tutors for their offspring or send them to school in England, most of the population was involved in the practical matter of survival. In 1696, the legislature authorized the first free college, King William's Free School (now St. John's College) in Annapolis. It was not until 1723 that the first general school act provided for a free school to be established on a hundred or more acres near the center of each county. Seven “visitors” (administrators) were to be appointed in each county to construct and supervise these schools.
The teachers were to be paid £20 a year and to be allowed to farm on the school property. The law required them to be “Members of the Church of England, and of pious and exemplary lives, and capable of teaching Grammar, Writing, and Mathematics…” Under a 1728 law, the “visitors” could determine the number of poor children that the master had to teach gratis. Students who could afford to do so had to pay a fee.
Good teachers were hard to find. According to Scharf's History, “The schoolmasters were generally a low and dissolute set, more than half of them being redemptioners [convicts] and servants… drunken in habits, severe and capricious in discipline, and teaching in a rude, irregular way.” Even as late as the 1890's, when Rufus Wood began setting up schools at Sparrows Point, he lamented the “backwardness of Southern peoples” (meaning us Baltimoreans) in matters of education. At that time, the majority of school-age children did not attend the public schools, and it was not until 1916 that state law required children 7 to 13 years old to go to school. Today, of course, schooling is mandatory, and there are many fine public schools in the county. Unfortunately, many of them were built during the 1950's or later. If they were a bit prettier, they would resemble prisons. We celebrate their academic quality but do not enjoy looking at them enough to include pictures in this book. Besides, now that the state has installed speed cameras in school zones, all I look at is the speedometer.
St. Paul's School
“Hymn number 393, boys – “Faith of our Fathers” – and put some roast beef into it!” I can still hear the Upper School headmaster Jim Ratcliffe leading a service in the chapel in 1971. Of the county's many fine private schools, my own alma mater, St. Paul's, will always be foremost in my thoughts. The last time I visited the campus was 1997, shortly after completion of the new chapel. The chapel that I remembered had vanished when flames gutted the old stables that housed both the chapel and the lower school. I entered the new building with a combination of reverence and sadness and sat down in one of the pews. The architecture was gorgeously, impeccably traditional. Yet the book racks held the bowdlerized hymnals that I remembered from the Kulturkampf that had alienated so many of the Episcopal Church's communicants. As the Very Reverend William N. McKeachie has written, during the 1980's and '90's, “The Episcopal Church increasingly experienced what might be called radical 'deconstruction' of its own doctrinal heritage and identity. What once constituted virtually unquestioned orthodoxy of basic belief was now not only called into question but sometimes unequivocally denied, even among the denomination's putative leadership.”
Not that I am particularly religious by nature. I never really liked going to church. When I started attending St. Paul's School in 1966, I was annoyed that chapel attendance was mandatory. But over the years, I came to love the simple service with hymns that opened each day, and there was no denying that prayer before exams seemed like a very good idea. The new liturgy was then only a cloud on the horizon, and I committed the hymns to memory before newly-offensive words like “man” and “son” were expunged like inconvenient Party members in old Soviet photographs. Consequently, my own experience of chapel at the school was untainted by the changes and conflicts to come...