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Bibliography
Mockridge, Ella. (1961). Our Mendham
Woodard, Colin. (2012). American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Penguin Books. https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
Munsell, W. W. (1882). History of Morris County, New Jersey
Theme Music:
Howard Harper-Barnes / La Danse Timide / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Transcript:
Working on this podcast about hometowns has me thinking a lot about why people move to Mendham. So I started asking everybody I talked to about their first impressions of this place.
MELISSA: I thought it was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen
Melissa Saharko moved to Mendham with her family from the DC area back in 2017.
MELISSA: We looked at houses in May and it just, this place sparkles, everything's green, the flowers are blooming... I love a small town Main Street. I love an old house. I love the character.
And that’s the answer I hear a lot. Mendham’s got charm and character up the wahzoo.
But if you’re putting down roots and starting a family somewhere, you’re going to be looking for more than flags on Main Street to seal the deal. Any parent worth their salt will tell you that education weighs heavily in choosing a new hometown.
MELISSA: Maybe it's the crowd I run with, but everyone I meet who's moved to town in the last few years has little kids. They've moved here for the school system.
(School sounds)
Jessica Couto is a teacher at Mendham Borough’s Hilltop School. She also happens to be my neighbor.
JESSICA: The curriculum is challenging, we have high expectations for our students…It's not just one factor that's leading us to have great schools.
Mendham Schools are some of the best in New Jersey. Our two public elementary schools have been awarded blue ribbon status, based on academic excellence.
Mendham Middle School is ranked 7th in the state - and that’s saying something. You remember how tough middle school is, right?
And West Morris Mendham High School is an International Baccalaureate World School, which gives students an option to learn in a flexible and cross-disciplinary environment.
By most measures, this means Mendham schools do an amazing job preparing their students for the future. But what makes Mendham schools so good?
Is it because this is a highly educated, upper class community? Of course, that’s definitly a factor.
But there’s another big reason why Mendham schools are some of the best in the state. And that has to do with…history!
—
(Theme)
Welcome to Hometown History. A series about the iconic places and events that make a town someplace people call home. Stories that people can tell to their friends old and new about the place they live, did live, or will live: In my case, Mendham, New Jersey.
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The best schools in the country, also known as the Ivy League, have three things in common, aside from being the best.
First, where they’re located.
If you pop open google maps, type in Ivy league, you’re not gonna get a map of the entire U.S. Instead, you’ll get a slightly zoomed in map of only a specific area of the country - the Northeast.
Second, their age:
Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth. They were ALL established before the revolutionary war. They’ve been around a while.
And finally, FINALLY, and this is really cool: Who established these schools.
William Tennet of Pennsylvania, John Harvard in Cambridge, James Pierpont of Connecticut. These guys had one thing in common. They were all ministers.
(Church organ sounds)
So what’s the connection between the clergy and education? And what does this all have to do with Mendham?
To answer these questions, we have to know a little bit more about the early settlers of America. In fact, let’s take a quick detour into the classroom…this is an episode about education after all.
(Classroom sounds)
You guys, be quiet. Professor Woodard is here.
COLIN: I'm Colin Woodard. I'm the author of six books, including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, which is a book about how regionalism is vital to understanding our country’s history…
Colin Woodard is a historian, author and Pulitzer Prize finalist. His unique area of interest is a fascinating blend of history, culture, and politics. His 2011 book, American Nations, is all about how our colonial past shapes and explains the present.
COLIN: Americans…don't know our history very well, and the history we receive is not always super clarifying or accurate.
Now, the first thing you have to remember is that America was colonized by several different groups of Europeans at several different times in history. There were Spanish, French, Dutch, English, German, and even Scottish and Irish people.
COLIN: They were entirely different cultures and indeed didn't expect to end up in a continent spanning federation together.
Here in the Northeast, the first settlers were Puritans. And if you remember anything from your 3rd grade history lesson, the Puritans were a group of protestant christians, who came to the “new world” seeking religious freedom.
But it was a little more complicated than that, right Colin?
COLIN: Right. They believed that they were in a covenant with God…that they had been chosen to do certain things in the world by God, and they would be punished or rewarded collectively for how well they did this. They were supposed to create a more godly and utopian society…And they had to do it as a group. Right. If one person messed up in the community, they could all be punished for it.
So these Puritan protestants settled in the Massachusetts Bay area looking to create a utopian society. This was the destiny they believed in, and they had to do it together.
COLIN: They believed that people had to read the scriptures themselves and find the truths in them.
Reading the Bible was of course a pretty important piece of creating a utopia. Except that there was just one problem: A lot of these texts were written in Latin, and most people didn’t speak latin.
So let’s say you’re a Puritan settler, you’re tasked with building a utopia together with all your God-fearing neighbors. And you believe that God will literally punish you and your community if you fail to do so. How do you study these texts? Do you just know latin, matrix style?
No, you gotta open some schools!
COLIN: And so out of that meant immediately on the frontier, they were building taxpayer financed public schools that were essentially mandatory. And that resulted very quickly by the mid 17th century, this was probably the most literate society on earth.
Ah ha! Literacy. When you have a literate society, that society has a way better chance at surviving, and even one day, creating a utopia.
Uh, Professor? So that was centuries ago. What does the story of the Puritans in the 1600’s have to do with education now?
COLIN: Yeah you'd think that it would get wiped away by all the movement of people since, and migration and immigration and mass culture and mass communications and transportation and all the rest. But it hasn’t…In fact… they managed to format the hard drive...They set out the institutions and cultural assumptions and all of those other things, values and the rest.
Huh, so even though there were only 20,000 Puritans living in New England way back in the 1600s, it’s their culture and their value system that seems to set the stage for how New England society operates today.
COLIN: And that seems to be, in fact, how it works.
Interesting. Alright, thank you Colin…I mean, Professor. Congratulations everyone. You just graduated Puritan History 101.
(Music)
So, we’re like eight minutes into this episode…and you’re probably like, “Ryan, what does this have to do with us here in Mendham? This is New Jersey, not New England.” I’m glad you asked.
Because Mendham’s success in education has a lot to do with its New England founders.
In 1740 one young protestant minister, Eliab Byram, graduated from Harvard, which was back then was a religious school.
Eliab Byram was originally from the Bridgewater area of Massachusetts - his recent ancestors were English Puritans, whose presence in the New World dated back to 1638.
We don’t know why he came to New Jersey (maybe that’s beside the point). He may have been a traveling minister who found himself in the area. Or perhaps he followed his father Ebenezer Byram, a devout man who followed the teachings of Rev. George Whitefield, whose sermons brought him to this area.
All we know is that he was down here by 1743 and became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Mendham in 1745.
(Church bells)
Because of this, the Byrams are considered to be one of the founding families of Mendham. Local history books even suggest they gave Mendham it's name. But even more importantly, they gave our town it's culture.
(Music - When I Surveyed the Wondrous Cross)
The Byrams and their New England protestant neighbors formatted the hard drive of Mendham, to use Colin’s analogy. They placed value in the things that their early Puritan society held dear - namely, God and education - the legacy of which is still felt today.
Eliab Byram became the first pastor of Hilltop Church, right here in Mendham, an institution that has a ton of history that we’ll talk about in a later episode.
But in terms of education, it was these religious men, some of whom preached in the pulpit at Hilltop, who were responsible for educating the citizens of Mendham.
So let me tell you about them:
(Music)
Mendham’s first school was established in the 1790’s by a man named Rev. Henry Axtell. It was simply referred to as “The Academy” in historical records. I guess “Axtell’s School for Witchcraft and Cider Making” didn’t have the same ring to it. Just kidding. That’s probably not true.
Rev. Axtell, born to a local family in Mendham, graduated from Princeton College and then started his school for boys, teaching them advanced literature, science and art.
He built his brick academy on the current site of Hilltop School. It was two stories high, one room on each floor, with a cupola on its north end where the school bell hung. (Quick side note for those who have no idea what a cupola is like me: they are most commonly used to provide ventilation or light to a building or to beautify the exterior.)
After about 10 years of teaching in Mendham, Rev. Axtell moved to New York State, and became - Oh! - one of the founders of Hobart And William Smith College. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
And while the tenure of “The Academy” in Mendham may have been brief, other schools soon took its place.
There was a school founded by Rev. William Rankin on Seminary Lane. Which is credited with preparing 76 students for college, 150 for teaching, 50 for the clergy, 30 as lawyers, and 12 who became medical doctors1.
And what if you were a woman in the mid 19th century? Mendham had a few options for you as well. They included the Mendham Female Seminary opened by M. M. Liddell in 1876, and a finishing school run by Mary Babbitt from 1881-1901. In fact, the Babbitt family was known for at least a couple schools throughout the 19th century.
And even though Mendham’s young women may not have been taught by clergy, their schools still operated under the recommendation of the church. A circular from 1847 advertising a girls school run by Martha Babbitt includes an endorsement from the current pastor at Hilltop Church, David H. Johnson, which says:
VOICE: “Having been long and intimately acquainted with Miss Sarah and Miss Martha P. Babbitt, it gives me pleasure to say that they are young ladies connected with the Presbyterian Church in this place - of amiable manner and irreproachable character. I consider them amply qualified to engage in teaching a Select School to the entire satisfaction of any who may think proper to give them their patronage.“
But the school that Mendham was perhaps best known for was called Hilltop School run by a man named Ezra Fairchild. Fairchild came from a well known family in Mendham and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1822. He opened his school for young boys at the Phoenix House in 1824, then relocated to the old “Axtell” school, on Hilltop Road.
By the 1850s Mendham was an education destination. In 1852 one visitor to Mendham - a Rev. Dr. Hasting - expressed astonishment at the level of education of the farmers from the town, who quoted Latin and Greek freely.
Throughout the 1800s, towns across New Jersey began to recognize the value of education for all its citizens. Schooling became more formalized and, importantly, separated from religious instruction.
(Music)
But Mendham was already way ahead of the game, thanks to the religious upbringing of it’s founders, the Byrams, Fairchilds, Axtells and others. The people that formatted the hard drive that the town’s culture and value system would be founded on.
There’s a reason why Mendham’s charming streets and quaint parades have an old town New England feel to them. It’s because this town was founded by former Puritans from New England! And it’s also the reason why people like Melissa Saharko and her family move to Mendham - for some of the best schools in New Jersey.
MELISSA: I feel very fortunate that we get to live in such a beautiful area and have these great schools available for our kids. And you know I can still get to Target in 20 minutes if I need to.
Now if only we can get a Target that’s a little bit closer. I would even settle for a Trader Joes.
Next time on Hometown History: Eliab Byram brought Mendham together under the roof of Hilltop Church. But in 1859, the ties that bound the community through religion were threatening to crumble.
This episode was written and produced by Ryan Ross and Katie Feather. It was mixed and edited by Katie Feather. Our theme music is La Danse Timide by Howard Harper-Barnes. Special thanks to Jessica Couto, Melissa Saharko, and Colin Woodard. Check out his book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.
Additional Information:
Thorough and Efficient: The Evolution of Public Education (New Jersey School Boards Association)
Our Mendham, Ella Mockridge, 1961
Episode 2: Leaders in Education