Common School District No. 2 at Milltown

Before 1870 · the mill villageA school in Milltown

Milltown was a working hamlet — mills, stores, and houses gathered along the watercourse where the road from Brewster met the roads to Danbury and DeForest Corners. Somewhere in that village center stood the one-room schoolhouse of Common School District No. 2. The 1867 Beers atlas marks a “School No. 2” right there among the mill-village buildings, beside the Roberts land.

The school is older than any deed for it. In February 1870 the district bought a narrow strip of ground from Mary S. and John B. Roberts Liber 48, p. 258, and that deed describes its parcel as beginning at the corner of “premises now owned by said District in the village of Milltown.” In other words, the district already held a schoolhouse lot there before 1870 — but no recorded deed conveys that original ground into the district by name. Like many old common-school lots, it appears to have been held by custom rather than paper. The founding date is simply not recoverable from the deed record, and we leave it at that: a school at Milltown by the 1860s, and very likely earlier.

1890s · the takingThe City takes the valley

Then the ground itself was condemned. Under the 1883 act that authorized New York City’s East Branch reservoir, the City filed condemnation maps in 1896 and took the low-lying heart of Milltown — the mills, the stores, and the schoolhouse lot among them. On the condemnation map (Sheet No. 13), the school appears as Parcel 37½, “Milltown School Dist.,” just an eighth of an acre, ringed by the other village parcels marked for acquisition.

1897–1898 · the moveA new school on the hill

Rather than close, the district moved uphill, out of the taking. On December 1, 1897 its trustee, N. Frank Paddock, bought a half-acre on the road north of the village from Mary E. Field for $300 Liber 81, p. 73 — four times the size of the cramped old village lot. The next year the district built a new schoolhouse there.

The Brewster Standard of August 12, 1898 reported it directly: among the year’s improvements was “the building of a new school house at a cost of $1,400.” That settles a question the building’s house-like appearance might otherwise raise — it was newly built in 1898, not the old schoolhouse moved. The same notice counts twenty-one families and thirty-eight children in the district, with Miss Alice I. Lobdell as teacher.

1898–1946 · the school yearsMiss Lobdell’s school

For nearly half a century the new schoolhouse ran as Milltown’s District No. 2. One ordinary afternoon survives in print: the Brewster Standard of June 30, 1899 records the pupils’ last-day-of-school picnic at the grounds of Mr. Van H. Townsend, where they presented their teacher, Miss Lobdell, with books and a writing desk “as a token of remembrance and love.” Townsend’s place sat just up the road from the new school — the short walk that day is itself a small confirmation the school was already in its new home.

The school closed in 1946, when the Town of Southeast’s rural districts were centralized into the Brewster Central School District. The building was declared surplus and sold at a June 1947 auction.

1947–present · a second lifeThe blue house today

At the 1947 sale the schoolhouse and its half-acre passed to Frank A. and Elizabeth F. Reed for $5,100 Liber 333, p. 619, and from there down an unbroken chain of private owners to the present. The county assessor’s card still carries the school’s original dimensions — 157.6 by 147.6 feet — even though the lot has since grown to 1.38 acres. Those measurements, the continuous deed chain, and the photo overlay all agree: the blue house at 204 Milltown Road is the District No. 2 schoolhouse.

Before the school · the landRaymond, Field, and the Philipse Patent

The half-acre was carved from a larger Milltown farm. Mary E. Field had bought that farm — some thirty acres, bounded by the Danbury and DeForest Corners roads — from George Raymond in 1868 Liber 45, p. 439. (Her husband, Thomas Field, kept the “T. Field Store” in the village center, marked on the period maps.) How the Raymonds first came by the ground runs deeper still: the earliest Raymond deed in the county’s first book is an 1812 conveyance from Frederick Philipse Book A, p. 8 — the Philipse Patent itself.