Maps of Nine Partners Patent; The Editor

The purchase of the school property was made by the New York yearly Meeting in 1795 and the deed"- shows that the trustees for the school bought the old store of Samuel Mabbett, with ten acres of land attached. It took a year to enlarge and adapt the store-building but late in 1796 Nine Partners Boarding School began to receive pupils. The building stood at the west end of lot number 26 of the great division that was made of Nine Partners Patent in 1734. This meeting house stands at the east end of lot number 11 and the boundary between lots 26 and 11 runs north and south between the school-site and the meeting house. Lot number 26 was assigned in 1734 to the heirs of William Creed and lot number 11 to the heirs of James Emott.

Nine Partners Boarding School ran from 1796 to 1863 (sixty-seven years), the last ten years under private auspices, as in 1853 the Yearly Meeting transferred its support and the funds of the school to an academy conducted by the Friends at Union Springs, Cayuga County, New York. In recent years that academy was moved to the town of Poughkeepsie, here in Dutchess, and we know it as Oakwood. So the spirit of Nine Partners marches on!

In 1887 Mr. John D. Wing, who in June, 1865, had acquired the school property, removed the building12 from its original site. He incorporated part of it in his own new dwelling and part in a barn. He saved the bell, which had signalled to so many children, and the bell is to be shown us today.

Two admirable articles13 about Nine Partners School are in print: one by the late Stephen H. Merritt and one by Esther Swift McGonegal, now of Millbrook. They contain much detailed information and are very valuable. Our time is so short today however that I will just refer you to those articles and ask you to turn with me in thought to the school as a center of influence of a personal sort. By that I mean I would like to speak of the effect the school had upon the lives of many individuals. In the course of its sixty-seven years there may have been an average annual attendance of one hundred boys and girls. Those several thousands of pupils were directly influenced and many other persons indirectly through them and all for things of the better sort.

The instruction at Nine Partners seems to have been characterized by thoroughness. Two sisters of my grandfather (one born in 1810 and the other in 1815) were pupils here for a while and until they died they knew what they had learned as children. One of them, when in her

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eighties, coached her grandson in French and geometry. Judging not only by those two old ladies but by other individuals of their period whom I have known personally, I believe that the teaching at Nine Partners School was marked by clarity and precision and—from all the scattered bits we know about the school—it is evident that obedience was required and moral principles stressed. For a school to live for over half a century and to train several generations of boys and girls and for its training to be marked by thoroughness and good discipline and by a call to practise homely virtues, means that the school sent out into life boys and girls who possessed something definite to live by, something soundly rooted.

Nine Partners School had a succession of superintendents and instructors but the teachers who, as teachers, were the most widely known and influential were Jacob Willetts and his wife, Deborah Rogers.

Jacob Willetts" was born in Fishkill, Dutchess County, in 1785 and in 1796, when he was eleven years old, he entered Nine Partners School. Continuing as a pupil until he was grown, he became head teacher. For two or three years (approximately 1813-1815?) he is referred to as teaching in a new school at Pine Plains, returning thence to Nine Partners. It is said that he later spent a few years at Nantucket and it is supposed that his removal there was occasioned by unusual conditions at Nine Partners. In 1828 the Society of Friends was divided into two groups, the Orthodox and the Hicksites, which separation created difficulties for Nine Partners School. But early in the 1830's Jacob Willetts returned to Dutchess and here at Mechanic he opened a school of his own, which continued until 1853. I understand that school was conducted west of this meeting house, near the present tennis-courts, and that it was for young men, whereas Nine Partners School was co-educational and took children of all ages.

Meanwhile, probably about 1819,1-5 Mr. Willetts established his own home in a small dwelling which is still standing west of the tennis courts and where, later this morning; we shall see an historical marker.

In the course of his many years of teaching Jacob Willets specialized in arithmetic, bookkswing and geography and in the first quarter of the nineteenth century he published" textbooks on those subjects which, (beginning in 1813) went through many editions and were in general use with a wide reputation. And so through personal contacts in the classroom and through his textbooks Jacob Willetts was a real

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