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Adin Ballou
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Adin Ballou as an Educational Reformer

"A Child of My Own Begetting":
Adin Ballou as an Educational Reformer

Lynn Gordon Hughes

The Hopedale Community was founded in 1842 as "a systematic attempt to establish an order of Human Society based upon the sublime ideas of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, as taught and illustrated in the Gospel of Jesus Christ."1 Its founder, spiritual leader, and animating spirit was Adin Ballou, the Universalist minister and social reformer whom historian Edward Spann calls "perhaps the least adequately appreciated of the major socioreligious thinkers of his times."2

Adin Ballou was primarily a synthesizer rather than an original thinker. The name he chose for his program, "Practical Christianity," expressed his preference for putting principles into action rather than elaborating the theory behind them. The Practical Christian project grew by accretion, incorporating the great reforms of the nineteenth century - temperance, abolition, women's rights - as well as an assortment of attempts to conquer the perennial sources of human misery: war, poverty, disease, and ignorance. In time the community developed a distinctive blend of perfectionism and pragmatism, which saw no incompatibility between a radical dedication of "all that we are and have ... to the cause of universal righteousness" and the expectation "for ourselves ... [of] a comfortable subsistence until death."3

Ballou's acceptance of each new cause followed a specific pattern. An idea would be introduced to him by one of its adherents. After an initial impulse to resist or ignore it, he would think it through, and conclude that it ought to be accepted. He would then incorporate it into his set of principles, vowing to uphold it whatever the personal cost. His account of his conversion to the temperance cause is typical:

My neighboring clerical friend, Rev. John M. S. Perry ... came to me with a prepared preamble and pledge which he offered as a basis for a temperance society in the town. In the multiplicity of my cares and labors, I had not previously given the subject much attention and so begged leave for a little time to consider it... I thoroughly investigated the subject, weighing its claims in the scales of reason and conscience. I saw its merits and answered its arguments. I became qualified to teach, defend, and successfully commend it to others, both by precept and example... [One] result of my espousal and championship of the temperance cause ... was the alienation of personal admirers, accompanied by a new baptism of vituperation and reproach... I knew what it was aforetime to be scorned and hated on account of theological and ecclesiastical offenses, but now I must endure ill-will and denunciation as a moral reformer, seeking only the personal good of my assailants.4
Similar stories described Ballou's adoption of the doctrine of universal salvation, of abolitionism, of pacifism, and of the various versions of "practical Christian socialism" practiced in Hopedale.5

There is, in Ballou's telling of his life story, one striking exception to this pattern of resisting, investigating, and finally championing causes brought to his attention by others. This is the cause of educational reform. In this case, there was no dramatic conversion experience, no anxious anticipation of having to defend a belief only recently and, perhaps, imperfectly accepted. It was, as he recognized, "a child of my own begetting - a creation of my own forming hand"6 - the most personal, the most original, and perhaps the most successful of his many endeavors to remake his world.

* * *

It is not surprising that education should be the most personal of Adin Ballou's reforms. After all, he had no personal experience of slavery or war, and - for those hard-drinking times - surprisingly little acquaintance with intemperance. Education, however, was a life-long passion. "From that time to the present," he wrote of his early childhood, "I have hungered and thirsted for knowledge with unsatisfied desire."7 His relationships with his parents, and his experiences as a student (or would-be student), were reflected in the choices he made when he himself became a teacher and, later, a parent. All of these experiences and relationships went into shaping his eventual educational theories and practices.

Ballou's early educational experiences were marked by frustration, deprivation, and occasional humiliation. He first attended a local schoolhouse in Cumberland, Rhode Island, three months in summer and three in winter, where "only the rudimental branches were taught, and these imperfectly." He recalled that neighbors in Massachusetts, which unlike Rhode Island had a system of public education (and an established church), "were prone to reproach us as ignorant and heathenish Rhode Islanders, which begat no very amiable feelings on our side the line."8 His earliest memories of school were not auspicious:

I was placed on the small boys' seat with others, a bashful, awkward little fellow, and ordered to keep still, but was very much at a loss what to do with myself or how to behave. For there was his majesty, the master, and a whole houseful of scholars, many of them men almost and women grown. And who was I! The scene comes to me afresh. I dropped my head, stuck one corner of the book in my mouth, and unconsciously began to gnaw it... At length, after much harm had been done, I was called up, ordered to take off my coat and roll up my shirt-sleeves, when the announcement was made that here was a boy with bad blood in his veins which must be taken out of him. The teacher then exhibited a fine sharp-pointed penknife as the lancet, and applied it to the skin of my arm with a slight prick. By this time the terror-stricken young culprit cried for mercy with such pitiful penitence that, on solemn promise of amendment, he was spared further punishment and sent to his seat.9

A few years later, he received "a droll, ignominious kind of punishment, more mortifying and vexatious than painful" for being overcome by stage fright at the prospect of reciting in a "dramatic exhibition" in the town meetinghouse. "It was a mock shaving, after the fashion of a barber, with a wooden razor, amid the laughter of the whole school."10

Despite such experience, young Adin "soon began to love books, study, and learning, fondly." But he received little encouragement to pursue this love. When he was eight, he was taken out of school entirely, to work in a cotton mill, in which his father was overseer and part owner. The scheme failed after a year and the family moved back to the farm, but he was thereafter able to attend school only in the winter term. "And even while attending my usual three months' school, my time was much broken in upon by a variety of calls at home and abroad."11

There does not seem to have been any compelling economic reason for the neglect and interruption of Adin Ballou's education. The Ballous were not struggling farmers or indigent factory workers; his father was a substantial landowner with enough cash to invest in a cotton mill. There were hired laborers on the farm, as well a number of older siblings who, Ballou tells us, "cared little for books."12 Adin was kept out of school not because his work was vital to the family, but because his father did not value education, and did not intend that his son should indulge in what he considered a frivolous luxury.

In contrast to the "stern and authoritative" father for whom "work was the fundamental law,"13 Ballou's mother seems to have had some interest in learning, and did her limited best to support her sons' intellectual aspirations. In her obituary, Ballou wrote, "Her mind, gifted with sound native sense and a strong thirst for improvement, was always restricted to scanty means, and, of course, gathered up only the fragments of general knowledge. These she employed to the great end for which she lived, the happiness of those around her."14 Adin clearly felt closer to her than to his father, and there are hints in his autobiography that she felt more in sympathy with her sons - Adin and his younger brother Ariel - than with her much older husband and the six children of his first marriage.

My mother used to say, when we of the younger brood complained of being hurried up in the morning and kept snug at work through the day, "You have a much easier time than your older brothers and sisters had, for your father has grown in years and does not drive ahead as he did when I first came to live with him." We thought it might be true, but that was no great comfort to us, as we still deemed our a hard lot in the labor line.15
This seems less a reprimand for complaining, than a good-humored acknowledgment of a common plight.

The conflict between father and son intensified as Adin matured. Among the customers for the Ballous' farm produce was Dr. Asa Messer, president of Brown University, who

would occasionally ask [my father] as he went his round when he was going to send one of his sons to college... I could not help having awakened in me the hope that somehow or other such a lot ... might be mine. At length the hope became so strong and my desire in that direction so great that I begged my father to give me a collegiate education, proposing that the three or four hundred dollars it would cost in those days should be my sole inheritance out of his quite large estate... So earnest was I in this matter that I believe I would have undertaken to crawl on my hands and knees to Providence, fifteen miles, if by so doing I could have secured my coveted object... If I plead my cause with great persistency and zeal, telling him how much better it would be for me to have the knowledge I would acquire than many times what it cost in money, he would refer me to a distant kinsman who spent his little patrimony in getting a liberal education, but had been unsuccessful and poor all his days. In vain I endeavored to unclinch this nail; for the inexorable conclusion was, "I cannot send you to college as your all and have you basking about in learned poverty." And so all my aspirations of this sort perished in the bud.16

Ballou's formal education ended with a few months at an "academy" in nearby Franklin, Massachusetts when he was sixteen. He had no formal preparation for the ministry. He simply began preaching, at eighteen, under the auspices of the Christian Connexion, an evangelical sect which his family had joined about ten years earlier. When he later joined the Universalists (whose clergy generally served an apprenticeship with an experienced minister) and, later in life, the Unitarians (many of whose clergy were college educated), he was accepted on the basis of his prior experience. Thus, his ministerial career, while a source of great personal growth and satisfaction, did little to satisfy his hunger and thirst after learning.

* * *

Ballou's education, despite its limitations, was sufficient to qualify him to teach in his local district school. At first it appeared that his career as a teacher would be plagued by the same kind of absurd and humiliating incidents he had suffered in childhood. Among his first pupils was "a lad of some twelve years old, of apparently defective organization and subject to half-insane fits of sullenness and ill-temper." When "tact, ingenuity, and wisdom" failed to control the boy, the young teacher resorted to "some more distinctively disciplinary and punitive measures," i.e. corporal punishment. The boy's father, "an ignorant, intemperate man," vowed revenge.

Of course I was to be prosecuted and made to suffer the full extent of the law. An astute, unscrupulous Justice of the Peace was found to issue a warrant against me... And to crown all, the conspirators planned to have the warrant served on me on the day of approaching wedding and while the nuptial festivities were going on... Everything proceeded joyously. Congratulations were extended to the bridal pair and the wedding feast was going on, when lo! the ministers of the law arrived ... and demanded, "in the name of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," that I should accompany them as their prisoner.
Fortunately, among the guests was a family friend who was a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. He sent the constables packing, "but not, however, before they had partaken of an undeserved portion of the wedding feast." When the case came to court, the charges were dismissed.17 The "tragico-comical affair" ended with Ballou's complete vindication and a "happy and successful conclusion" to the school term.

Despite its triumphant conclusion, however, Ballou recalled the affair of the schoolboy, the wedding, and the judge with embarrassment and, I think, guilt over his treatment of the boy. His one recorded attempt to use force to compel good behavior was not a happy one.18 Certainly he adopted a very different approach when faced with another disobedient pupil. This incident occurred a few years later, when Ballou was settled at the Universalist church in Milford, Massachusetts, but continued teaching in order to make ends meet.

I had among the rest a somewhat troublesome boy whose misbehavior evoked repeated reproofs on my part, but to little purpose. One day, after some fresh violation of the rules, I summoned him to my desk in unusually stern tones of voice, saying to him as he stood before me that I plainly saw that he meant to have some one whipped and the matter must be settled forthwith. "Now," said I, "here is my rod and I suppose it must be used or you cannot be cured of your misconduct. I cannot bear to whip you; perhaps it will do more good if you whip me. At any rate, I have concluded to try it." Whereupon I took off my coat and having laid it aside, handed him the rod and told him to use it on me long enough to make him a good boy. [He] refusing to take it, I insisted that he should, inasmuch as it was necessary for him to do so in order to teach him obedience to the rules of the school. The boy broke down, wept bitterly, and promised that he would not repeat his offenses. I then sent him to his seat amid the amazement of the whole school, and he gave me no further trouble.19
Ballou himself did not draw a connection between the two incidents; in fact, he claimed to have forgotten the second one entirely until reminded years later by one of his former pupils. Clearly, however, he had by this time firmly rejected conventional methods of classroom discipline. Ridiculous and undignified it may have been, but in his eyes, the alternative was still more so.

* * *

Adin Ballou married twice, and had from each marriage one child who survived early childhood. With his daughter Abbie (born just three weeks before her mother's death), he seems always to have enjoyed a warm companionship and partnership. She entered readily into all of her father's schemes, and was by all accounts a gifted teacher and scholar. Of the early days at Hopedale, when she was thirteen, she later recalled, "Being fond of children, another young girl and I were ordinarily assigned a position in the nursery group, where I managed at times, three or four cradles... Fortunate was I when the occupants of the cradles did not all at once demand too much of my attention and left me time for reading."20

Abbie began teaching in the Hopedale primary school in her early teens. By the time she was nineteen, she had graduated from the teachers' training course at the state Normal School and become the head teacher at the Hopedale school. Her students remembered her as "the one who most of all left a permanent impress on the minds and hearts of the Hopedale youth ... Mrs. Abbie, our devoted and beloved teacher and friend," under whose "inspiring teaching ... all who came under her influence in the old school house must feel that their lives had a fortunate beginning."21 When she was twenty-two, Abbie married William Heywood, her father's ministerial student. The couple were Adin Ballou's staunchest disciples and assistants for the remainder of his life.

The child of Adin Ballou's second marriage was his son, Adin Augustus (known as Augustus). Like his sister, he was brought up to be a teacher and sent to the Normal School; where he fell ill and died, at the age of eighteen. It is impossible to reconstruct, from the story of his short life as told by his grieving parents, the quality of the relationship between Adin Ballou and the son he eulogized as "a joyous child, a sprightly, winsome lad, a promising youth, and a model young man."22 I have the impression, however, that it was a more conflicted relationship than that with Abbie, and that perhaps Augustus did not have so strong a vocation for teaching as his sister. He was, at any rate, the focus of a tremendous weight of parental hopes and dreams.

All children at Hopedale did some work in the community as part of their education, so it is not remarkable that Augustus began working in the Hopedale printing office at ten; but it is surely strange that he became foreman at fourteen. As the boy grew, his father "watched the indications of his maturing ambition with anxious solicitude lest the temptations of the prevailing civilization should allure him from the struggling cause of Christian Socialism so dear to my heart." When at seventeen "he took his stand for what I deemed right and good" by formally joining the community, immediately "all eyes were turned to him ... as the leading teacher and manager" of the soon-to-be-established Hopedale Educational Institute, a proposed boarding school that would serve students "from the infant group to the highest collegiate class."23 It was, in other words, to be a far more ambitious undertaking than the humble district school that Abbie led.

Since Hopedale was in theory, and to a considerable extent in practice, committed to equal rights for women, there is no obvious reason why Augustus, who had never taught or expressed a particular interest in teaching, should have been chosen for this position over Abbie, who already had several years of progressively responsible teaching experience and a diploma from the Normal School. Perhaps the Ballous felt that Abbie was already settled in life, and that Augustus needed a place. But I suspect that in part, Adin Ballou was repeating, in his relationship with his son, the pattern of his relationship with his own father. The content of the expectations was different, but the intensity was the same. Adin Ballou tried to give his son the upbringing he wished his father had given him; but it was not necessarily the upbringing his son would have chosen.

* * *

Without the kind of conscious, and conscientious, thought that characterized other aspects of the Hopedale venture, Adin Ballou improvised an educational program based on a highly effective combination of entertainment, meaningful work, high expectations, and the use of moral suasion (some might say emotional manipulation) to guide the awakening conscience.

Ballou seems to have genuinely enjoyed children and, in their company, relaxed his usual earnest and humorless demeanor. Where no serious moral issues were at stake, he would humor and cajole children, for example by making up rhymes to help them remember their manners. Entertainments - frolics, festivals, games, picnics, dances, even a trip to Boston to see "trained seals and mice" - were part of the Hopedale program. Ballou had no desire to duplicate the austerity of his own upbringing. Though some of the community members protested, he had no objection to recreation, so long as it was carefully chosen to "exclude all enervating frivolity, all unseemly vulgarity, all rough and brutal conduct."24

Meaningful work was a cornerstone of the educational experience at Hopedale. According to the constitution of 1844, "All children and youth under 18 years of age ... after leaving the nursery shall be regularly instructed in the useful arts and sciences four hours per day." That this was primarily for educational rather than economic reasons is shown by that fact that the practice was continued even after it was discovered in 1846 that "the services of children and supernumaries had not been made to accrue as they ought to the financial advantage of the Community."25 Economically sound or not, the work done by the children was real, responsible work in which they could take legitimate pride - even if most did not, like Augustus Ballou, become foremen in their teens.

A crucial aspect of the program was that the children (again, Augustus is perhaps an exception) were allowed to choose the work they would learn, and to structure their education around their choices. The 1844 constitution specified that all community members over the age of ten should be allowed, as far as possible, to select the branch of industry in which they would work and the work group or "band" in which they would be enrolled. The report of the Board of Education in 1854 described the Hopedale district school as one in which "each pupil will be able to receive the elements at least of that kind of education adapted to the peculiar calling in life which he or she may select, whether that of scholar, artist, mechanic, teacher, farmer, or whatever other employment a man or woman can honorably engage in."26 Students are likely to be highly motivated when their educational program is linked to a set of personally chosen goals (an educational philosophy which has recently been rediscovered).27

Both the Hopedale district school and the Hopedale Home School (a scaled-down version of the Educational Home, presided over from 1856 to 1863 by William and Abbie Heywood) had ambitious goals for the mental, physical, and moral education of their students. The Home School was "designed that in connection with [the] scholastic training the pupil should be taught the laws of health, in order that a symmetrical development of the body be secured; also the conditions and laws of moral and spiritual life, so that the roots of selfishness and sin should be eliminated from the nature of the child." A former student of the Home School credited it with "stimulat[ing] self-reliance, the habit and power of thought, patient investigation, dispassionate judgment, freedom of opinion, independence of character, [and] self-culture."28

At the same time that it cherished these high expectations, the Hopedale community experienced a surprising amount of misbehavior on the part of its young members. In the early days of the community, Adin Ballou recalled, the children were "rude and uncouth in their manners, and unused to self-discipline and self-regulation." In 1847 there were "frequent complaints of lawless ways and growing disrespect of proper authority" among the older boys. A statute of 1849 enacted "in the interest of morality, good manners and the truest culture" established an 8:00 curfew for children and required parents and guardians to ensure "that those under their care refrain from all profanity, from all vulgarities in word or action, and from all obscene utterances or writings; that in their recreations they indulge in no habits of injuring, annoying or vexing their playmates."29

The gap between the lofty goals and the lowly reality is striking, and, I believe, indicative of one of the secrets of the community's success. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Adin Ballou's reporting of the young people's misbehavior is the utter lack of surprise or dismay. His personal experiences - his struggle against his father's authority, the lessons he had learned as a young schoolmaster, and the growth of his own children - had taught him that it was the nature of young people, especially young men, to be rebellious. It was normal, it was expected, and it had no bearing on their ability to grow into highly responsible adults. Hence, he always treated young people with respect and unfailingly high expectations; and in the end they did not disappoint him. The "rude and uncouth" children "all seemed to reverence and love me and to have respect for my wishes and requirements." Ballou's method is clear in his account of his treatment of the lawless and disrespectful young men:

As they were always respectful toward me and ready to listen to my advice, I called them together for consultation upon the matter, proposing to them a scheme for employing themselves in some effective way when not otherwise engaged. They readily assented and an association was formed accordingly, duly officered, and put in working order. Several acres of land for gardening and tillage were set apart for their use and other facilities granted as an encouragement to their undertaking. The project worked well and happily for a few years, fulfilling all reasonable expectations and passing away amid the fluctuations with which we were unescapably beset.30

Girls received the same education as boys in the Hopedale schools, characterized by the same principles of meaningful work and high expectations. Ballou's commitment to gender equality reflected his happy experience with the women in his life. I have the impression that he expected girls to be tractable, but was pleasantly surprised to find them capable as well. This is apparent in his growing respect for and reliance upon his daughter. In an age characterized by the "cult of domesticity," quite a number of Hopedale girls went on to pursue higher education and careers.31

The final, and in our time, the most controversial, element of the Hopedale educational program was the use of guilt as a motivator of good behavior. At the time, of course, this was seen not as emotional manipulation but as the awakening of the child's conscience, a wholly praiseworthy aim. Still, there is something distinctly disturbing in the dialogue between father and son, recorded in the memorial volume which Adin Ballou wrote after the death of his son, in which ten-year-old Augustus' conscience is awakened to the evil of attending a military muster.

Father: My son, you know that I love you, and always desire to gratify your wishes, when it can be done innocently. But how can I, who abhor War, and am all the time preaching against it, consent that you should go an be an admirer of soldiers?

Son: Why, father, they are not going to kill anybody with their guns and swords today. They are only going to march about in fine uniforms, with bands of lively music.

Father: But do they not meet, my son, to learn the art of War - to prepare themselves to kill their fellow-creatures - so that when War comes they may be ready for it? The uniforms, and marching, and music, may all be very pleasing as a show, if we do not consider that wholesale murder is at the end of it.

After further discussion in this vein, the dialogue continues:

Son: I never thought of all this, father. It looks wrong. But I cannot tell you how much I want to see them march and hear their music!

Father: Well, my son, I see that you now understand why I cannot approve of your going. You have reason of your own, and you have a conscience. I should be very glad to gratify you, if I did not think it would be a sin against our father in heaven. I cannot see how I should be able to justify myself, either to God or men, if I should be called in question. But I am going to leave you entirely to your own reason and conscience. I have said enough. I will not give my approval of your going to the muster, neither will I forbid you. Go, if you think it right. I will not hinder you.

Son: But I cannot do so, father; I want your approval, if I go.

Father: I cannot give you that, my son. I can only permit you to go on your own responsibility, and also assure you, that though I shall be sorry to have you go, yet I shall still be your loving Father, when you return, and do you all the good in my power. I can say no more. Make up your mind now for yourself.

After this, Ballou tells us, "He walked to and fro, and left the room, with his bosom heaving, his face flushed, and all his soul in a struggle between inclination and temptation on one side, and reason and conscience on the other. But within five minutes the matter was settled forever. He returned with a meek, calm, firm, tearful face, glorious with moral heroism."32

The methods used to cure the young of misbehavior were the same that would be used to cure society of the evils of war, intemperance, and slavery: a reliance on moral suasion, and an absolute prohibition on physical force. Though he may have forgotten instructing that boy in the Milford school to beat him, Ballou never forgot the lesson he had learned on that occasion.

All of Adin Ballou's educational experiences - his humiliations and triumphs as a student and as a teacher; his unsuccessful attempt to go to college; his partnerships with his mother, daughter, and wives; his struggle with his father; his blasted hopes of his son - formed the background to the educational program that he developed at Hopedale. The program reflected the personality strengths and weaknesses of the man himself. He could be rigid, humorless, and self-righteous. His non-violence could be surprisingly aggressive, and he did not always temper the weight of his expectations to the capacity of the child who had to bear them. On the other hand, the program reflected his optimism, born from his Universalist faith, that everyone could achieve goodness. He loved children, he enjoyed them, he respected them; he expected each one to succeed, and he rejoiced when they did. And that, in the end, is what they remembered about their Hopedale education.

Notes

1. Adin Ballou, History of the Hopedale Community (Lowell, Mass., 1897), 1.

2. Edward K. Spann, Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town 1840-1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992) xiii.

3. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 4.

4. Adin Ballou, Autobiography of Adin Ballou (Lowell, Mass., 1896), 219-225.

5. See, for example, Ballou, Autobiography, 77-88 (conversion to Universalism); 170-179 (affiliation with "Restorationist" wing of Universalism, which believed in limited punishment in the afterlife); 277-284 (abolitionism); 306-309 (pacifism, in the form of "Christian non-resistance"); Autobiography, 320-337 and History of Hopedale, 8-14 (decision to form Hopedale community).

6. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 222.

7. Ballou, Autobiography, 18.

8. Ballou, Autobiography, 17.

9. Ballou, Autobiography, 18.

10. Ballou, Autobiography, 22.

11. Ballou, Autobiography, 39.

12. Ballou, Autobiography, 18.

13. Ballou, Autobiography, 9, 13.

14. Ballou, Autobiography, 259.

15. Ballou, Autobiography, 13.

16. Ballou, Autobiography, 40.

17. Ballou, Autobiography, 73-75.

18. It is tempting to speculate that this experience influenced Ballou's later association of the law with physical violence, and his firm determination to avoid both. In the "Standard of Practical Christianity," the manifesto of the Hopedale community, he wrote, "We cannot employ carnal weapons nor any physical violence whatsoever to compel moral agents to do right or to prevent their doing wrong." For this reason, "we voluntarily withdraw from all interference with the governments of this world." This meant, among other things, a ban on "aiding in the execution of their legal vengeance," "claiming their protection against violence," and "seeking redress in their courts." History of Hopedale, 4-5.

19. Ballou, Autobiography, 112. In describing this incident, Ballou compared it to "the methods employed by the philosopher, A. Bronson Alcott, in his far-famed Boston school." It is also strikingly similar to an incident in the life of John Brown, who employed this form of discipline on his son. See Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 24.

20. Abbie Ballou Heywood, "Hopedale Community, Founded in 1841, in its Origin and Early History," in Hopedale Reminiscences: Papers read before the Hopedale Ladies' Sewing Society and Branch Alliance (Hopedale, 1910), 66.

21. Ellen M. Patrick, "Our Community School and its Teacher," in Hopedale Reminiscences, 39; Sarah E. Bradbury, "Community Life as Seen by One of the 'Young People'," in Hopedale Reminiscences, 12.

22. Ballou, Autobiography, 236.

23. Ballou, Autobiography, 377. The proposed school is discussed in History of Hopedale, 218-223, and in Spann, Hopedale, 93-95.

24. For Ballou's views on amusement, see History of Hopedale, 180-182. Detailed descriptions of many formal and informal festivities are found throughout Hopedale Reminiscences.

25. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 137, 156.

26. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 273.

27. Since 1996, the Rhode Island public school system has offered an alternative high school, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, which is based on just such a philosophy. The school combines individualized, "one-room schoolhouse"-style instruction based on each student's career goals with an internship with a mentor in the community.

28. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 268; "Retrospective Sketch" in Hopedale Home School, Home School Memorial: reunion of teachers and pupils of the Hopedale Home School, at Hopedale, Milford, Mass., August 1, 1867 (Cambridge, 1868), 49-51.

29. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 72, 174, 192.

30. Ballou, History of Hopedale, 73, 174.

31. Among Hopedale girls whose later lives are chronicled in Ballou's history of the town of Milford: Lizzie Humphrey attended Cooper Institute School of Design and became a successful artist and designer. Anna Thwing and Sarah Lillie had long careers as teachers. Adin Ballou, History of the Town of Milford (Milford, 1888), 745, 831, 879. It would be interesting to trace the later lives of a larger sample of the Hopedale children.

32. Adin Ballou, Memoir of Adin Augustus Ballou (Hopedale, 1853), 22-26.