The Other Nathan Hale Schoolhouse

The little red is a unique fixture of New London. But there’s another diminutive school with the same claim to fame, in East Haddam on the Connecticut River. Hale taught here beginning in the fall of 1773, just after graduating from Yale, and the experience led directly to his to coming to New London. I went to see it one morning, looking for some connection between this school and the familiar one on the Parade.

Hale thought East Haddam, which was then also known as Moodus and which he called “East Haddam (alias Modos)” was an isolated wilderness. On the lonely drive up Route 9, I was inclined to agree. Coming not from New London but from the West, I had to cross the river on the venerable swing bridge that dominates the town. As I waited (and waited, and waited) in a long line of cars, I felt like I had entered a small realm with rules and customs all its own.

Finally the flashing gates lifted and we could cross. I drove past the splendid Goodspeed Opera House and the other buildings of Main Street, each pretty in its own unique way, none matching, but all somehow fitting together. I was glad I’d come early, because the Nathan Hale Schoolhouse wasn’t open yet.

Here I should explain that I have a fear of costumed interpreters. This is both silly and inconvenient considering I write about history, and travel, and that I majored in acting. Yet when I see someone coming toward me wearing a hoop skirt or holding a musket, my first instinct is to flee.

The Schoolhouse stands above the town; you can spot it in the distance from a church parking lot below. I climbed up a paved path which became a gravel track and then simply grass. I ducked under a chain between two gate-posts (you get used to doing things like that when you frequently evade the staff at historic sites.) There at the top of the hill, across the wide lawn, it stood, looking like one of those red Monopoly buildings. I crossed towards it, waving my arms around my head in an attempt to swat away the army of tiny persistent flies, looking like a lunatic or someone talking on a Bluetooth.

From the Schoolhouse, you can look down on the top of the church and the cemetery beside it. In the other direction is the river. The building itself is simple, with a peaked roof and brick chimney. Like its New London counterpart, it struck me as both adorable and a terribly confined space to have to sit in all day learning math and grammar.

I imagined Nathan Hale trying to control children, from very young to his own age (18) who would rather run on the grass or throw snowballs or gaze out at the water and the boats passing by. I pictured them all trudging up that path in feet of snow. But as it turns out, the school was not always on this hilltop. It was moved here in 1900, but in Hale’s day it was down on Main Street. At that spot now, there is bust of Hale on a column. It looks slightly alarming, like a disembodied head floating just above the traffic.

Though his other schoolmaster friends were scattered in small towns across the state, East Haddam was apparently considered a particularly dire placement. One friend wrote Hale, “I am at a loss to determine whether you are yet in this land of the living, or removed to some far distant and to us unknown region; but this much I am certain of, that if you departed this life at Modos, you stood but a narrow chance for gaining a better.”

Alexander Rose, in his book Washington’s Spies, jokes that “East Haddam’s night life consisted of sitting on chairs.” By winter Hale had had enough, and applied to New London’s Union School. He was teaching there by the spring of 1774.

I drove away from that “far distant” place, back toward New London, perhaps taking the route Nathan Hale would have traveled. I later looked at the Schoolhouse on the Parade and saw it fresh: not tiny and old-fashioned, but an entrance to a larger world, full of opportunities and ideas and dangers.