Kurt A. Sanftleben, LLC
Hiram Roy
1849 – Certification of a rural Illinois common school in Kane County by its School Directors
$250
Item Details
Dundee Township, Illinois, 1837, Unbound
Very good
This three-page common school certification, which was required for the school teacher to be paid by the county, measures 15.5” x 10” unfolded.
The inside two pages contain a table showing daily attendance for 18 boys and girls that attended Hiram Roy’s common school, officially in school “district No five in township forty two north ranges seven and eight of the third principal meridian.” It also contains a statement regarding the table, which was sworn to by Roy before a justice of the peace. That statement reads:
“I certify that the foregoing schedule of scholars attending my school and residing as therin named and specified to the best of my knowledge is correct that it was a school for the purpose of teaching various branches of an English education and that the common medium of communication was the English language.”
The first page cover letter, signed by the school directors, Albro (sp?) Gilbert and Marshall Sherman, additionally states that
“We have carefully examined the foregoing schedule and find the same to be correct that the scholars named therein were at the date of their attendance residents of district No five . . . and that there is due the said H. Roys for instructing the scholars therein named at the time therein mentioned the sum of fifteen dollars 70 cts. We also certify that the said teacher exhibited to us a legal certificate of qualification and good moral character before he was employed to teach. . .."
Online records show that these students would have resided in Rutland and Dundee Townships, just north of the city of Elgin and northwest of Chicago.
At the time of this certification, the common school movement, founded by Horace Mann in 1837, was in full swing. These schools, often established in rural areas, were designed to provide a universal, non-sectarian, and publicly funded education to all children, regardless of their social class or background. They were supported by local taxes rather than private tuition or charitable donations. Secondary institutions, focused their curricula on “the three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic) plus history, geography and moral instruction. The state's insistence upon instructor competency eventually gave rise to the creation of “normal schools,” i.e., collegiate-level professional teacher-training programs.
Scarce. At the time of listing, no similar certificates are for sale in the trade, and the Rare Book Hub identifies none as having appeared at auction. OCLC shows two “common school” teacher certificates are held by institutions, although no similar school certifications are identified in any institutional collections.
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