It’s unlikely that Eliza was involved on a day-to-day basis, according to Mazzeo. Spelling was taught from Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, a popular text of the time. “All of the scholars came from the locality between High Bridge and Kingsbridge,” he recalled many years later.įlitner recalled that the school provided students with textbooks, and that they studied arithmetic by doing calculations on slates.
HAMILTON ELIZA FREE
On the Hamilton Free School’s shoestring budget, it could afford just one teacher, who also doubled as the school’s janitor, according to the reminiscences of William Herbert Flitner, who attended the school in the 1840s. Legislators approved the application and the school received some annual city funding.Įliza Hamilton and her benefactors moved quickly, and by the end of May, they’d already built a one-room, 1,050-square-foot schoolhouse with a slanted roof-big enough for 40 to 60 students-around what is now Broadway between W. In March 1818, the group petitioned the New York State Legislature to incorporate a free school, and asked for $400 to build a new school building. The widow couldn’t afford a bigger place, but a group of wealthier women in the area decided to help. But the number of students quickly grew, that improvised setup wasn’t adequate. 183rd Street, to be repurposed as a schoolhouse. As biographer Ron Chernow has written, the deeply religious widow also “believed passionately that all children should be literate in order to study the Bible.” Hamilton Free School Established in Northern ManhattanĪccording to documents unearthed in the early 1900s by the New-York Historical Society, Eliza started out by finding a small house near Fort Washington, the Revolutionary War fort that was located at the intersection of present-day Fort Washington Avenue and W. “Eliza Hamilton wanted to find a way to honor Hamilton's memory, in the place where their last home had been together,” says Mazzeo.Įliza was also driven by her faith. Mazzeo, author of the 2019 biography Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton, explains. She “made huge sacrifices to send the children to school in town and to keep them at home with her,” Tilar J. In those days, the still-isolated area didn’t have any free public schools, and paying tuition at a private academy was too much for parents to afford, according to Don Rice, president of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum Alliance, a community institution that has helped to preserve the history of the area.Įliza, who had to struggle to pay for her own children’s education after her husband’s death, could empathize. WATCH: Hamilton: Building America on HISTORY Vaultĭespite the move, Eliza retained a connection to people who lived a few miles away from her old home. Even so, according to Gill, Eliza eventually became unable to afford the estate’s upkeep, and in 1813, she was forced to sell it and move to humbler quarters downtown. The following year, a group of her husband’s deep-pocketed friends bought the house and property from Eliza for $30,500 and promptly sold it back to her for $15,000, so that she would have money to take care of herself and her family. But at the time of Hamilton’s death, he still had a mortgage and owed money to the builders, and his wife struggled under the weight of all that debt. 143rd Street just east of Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, where she was surrounded by gardens filled with tulips, hyacinths, lilies and roses, according to historian Jonathan Gill. After her husband’s death, Eliza Hamilton remained for a time in The Grange, the clapboard two-and-a-half-story home located on what is now W.
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