Building date: 1834, date stone in possession "Mrs. Titus of Weedsport - (deceased)"
Original use: Schoolhouse
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Map views courtesy Google Maps. Address is GIS Database and Google Earth confirmed; 43°00'18.52"N 76°30'57.55"W. Current owner of record, Buske as of date (YMD) 190311.
The provided street address is not confirmed, but inferred from the Google Maps location data. This cobblestone structure was not included the Roudabush Study.
NOTE
Town of Sennett and Cayuga County Maps
Cobblestone schoolhouse, south side of Route 5 east of Sennett.
Former schoolhouse, Hope for cobblestone ruin?, Auburn, N.Y., The Sunday Citizen, March 2, 1975
By Irene C. Tallman
A cobblestone ruin, on the road to Syracuse, just east of Sennett, may be restored and emerge as a new entity. Its past life, until 60 years ago, was a country schoolhouse.
John Haney, executive manager of The Ponderosa, on his way to and from work every day, kept eyeing the weed-grown pile of cobblestones with parts of jagged roofless walls still standing, framing vacant window openings. It struck him that what was left of the ruin could be the start of an attractive home. He bought two adjoining acres when he made the deal for the schoolhouse site, and has cut down some of the wilderness that had all but obliterated the crumbling masonry.
Cobblestone School was built at a cost of $305. The stone came from round about - farmers were glad to get them off their fields and probably helped tote the stone and put up the four walls, 22 feet square, in order to have a place for their children to go for book learning. It was done and ready for use in the fall of 1835, and the first teacher was Edward Edmonds of Jericho Road which branches off the Grant Avenue road opposite the school. Edmonds earned $30 teaching there two months that first winter of the school's existence, and boarded himself. He lived on Jericho Road which the school faced. Later he went into the ministry and preached more than 50 years in a Boston Church.
It depended on how many children a family had in school how much taxes they paid. Taxes were figured on the basis of half a cent per resident, multiplied by the number of children the taxpayer had in school, and multiplied again by the days they attended. In the 1800s, children often went to school only in the wintertime, and stayed home to help with the farm work in spring and fall. Records don't reveal how many children one William A. Tanner sent to school in 1863, or how many days they went, but there is still a tax roll that says his taxes that year were $1.05.
It was up to the district fathers in those days to keep the "scholars" warm, and every father was expected to furnish half a cord of wood per year for every child he sent to the district school. It had to be good, hardwood, sawed or chopped to fit the pot-bellied stove, and piled neatly in the wood house. It was up to the schoolmaster, or the schoolmarm, to keep the fires going, even to start them, so the kids could dry out their snowy boots and mittens when they got there mornings and get warm, but not burn their soles around the sometime red-hot chunk stove. The smell of scorched wool and leather was not uncommon.
Cobblestone School had many teachers. They changed often in those days; a term was just a few weeks, and teachers seldom stayed more than a few weeks in a school. Mrs. Elsie G. Smith, Sennett town historian, went there to school the spring of 1897 and her teacher was Alia M. Hudson. Mrs. Smith says the school was in use until May 1912 when a lack of pupils caused it to close. Part of the district was annexed to the Jericho School District in Brutus, down Jericho Road a little piece from Cobblestone. The rest of it went to Sennett Village School No. 7. There may be a few old Cobblestone scholars around somewhere, but there have been no reunions, perhaps ever, and questions probably will go forever unanswered about the country school days of Cobblestone. Courtesy Richard Palmer blog.
- "Cayugas Cobblestones", by Ward O'Hara 1991
- Pages 32 - 34
 Sen-1 Haney.jpg ¹ |  Sen-1 8004 Route 5 East 1.jpg ² |  Sen-1 8004 Route 5 East 2.jpg ² |  Sen-1 8004 Route 5 East 3.jpg ² |
 School house, Route 5, Sennett.jpg ³ | .jpg) School house, Sennett (2).jpg ³ |
¹ Image courtesy Cobblestone Museum
² Photography courtesy Martin and Sheila Wolfish.
³ Photography courtesy Richard Palmer.
