Bleecker Village

In the mid-19th century, District 3, then called “Bleecker Village,” was the major population center of the town, as well as its most heavily industrialized area. For this reason, the school has an alternative name in the local vernacular: the Factory School. Few vestiges of this productive heyday – dominated by resource extraction activities including tanning, lumbering and attendant manufacture – remain in the built environment of the neighborhood, or indeed the town. Today, only the tannery foundation, the dam on nearby Lake Edward above the vanished sawmill, and a burial ground named “The Factory Cemetery” now indicate this bygone era in Bleecker Village. The school survived deindustrialization, depression and multiple wars to serve District 3 students for another hundred years.

Bleecker Village looking east toward the school (beyond church), n.d.