History of Milford Schools

or more than 215 years, young people in and around Milford have been educated on both sides of the Mispillion River in both tax supported and private schools.

Although early records are vague and incomplete, the Reverend Alex Houston is listed as having established a select school in the Presbyterian Meeting House near Three Runs on King's Highway in 1777. Another school was built and operated on what is now Park Avenue in 1787 by the surveyor William Johnson.

Until the passage of the school law by the state in 1829, other religious groups of the Milford vicinity conducted schools in many of their churches. There is record of a Methodist church and school on North Street and a Quaker establishment near what is the Roosa property of today.

In the early 1800s the need for quality education became evident as the colleges of the region Delaware College, Amherst College, Dickinson, Yale, and others required that the only prepared young men may enroll for study for careers in law, medicine, or the clergy. Young ladies could take preparation in modern languages, art, and music.

In accordance with the Delaware Constitution of 1792, the legislature in 1796 created a fund establishing schools which should teach "most branches of knowledge as are useful and necessary in completing a good English education." This fund, however, was not used until 1817 when each county received $1,000.00 for the education of "poor children." The fund was replaced by the more inclusive "Act for the Establishment of Free Schools" which was drafted by Judge Willard Hall of the Federal District Court in Delaware. The Act of 1829 initiated the principle of matching funds which created tax-supported schools in competition with private ones.

The best known school that existed in Milford during the first half of the 19th Century was private and was called the Academy. After 1810 its classes met in the brick building that once stood on Northwest Second Street between Church and North Streets. This structure was erected by Elias Shockley who retained a builder's lien against it until 1832, when the property title passed into the hands of Temple Lodge #9 A.F. and A.M. in exchange for the sum of $250.00. For the next fourteen years, the Masonic Lodge sponsored the Academy and occasionally made it possible for poor children, some of whom later became prominent Milfordians, to attend school on funds provided by the lodge.

During the period 1810-1846 many men of local fame attended the Academy. Their names include Henry Judah, Reverend John L. McKim, William Wolf, Daniel Curry, Curtis Watson, Caleb and Joshua Layton, Hiram and James McColley, and Daniel Godwin. Three others achieved national prominence.

After a troubled beginning, John M. Clayton left the Academy an entered Yale later becoming a United States Senator and Secretary of State under President Taylor. Clayton appointed Academy graduate George P. Fisher to the Department of State where he was instrumental in keeping Delaware, a border state, in the Union. Fisher later presided over the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators.

John Lofland, willful and undisciplined, ignored scientific courses in order to pursue courses such as Latin, French, history and mythology. He tried his hand teaching at the Academy, but soon left because he preferred teaching only the brighter students. The "Milford Bard" used alcohol and opium to excess, but he achieved some fame as a ghostwriter, a newspaperman, an author of poems and stories, and a friend of Edgar Allen Poe.

The Academy dominated the educational scene during most of the first half of the 1800s because tax supported schools received uncertain public support. However, in 1846, when the Academy passed from the control of the Masonic Lodge into the control of the United States Districts #42 and #43 of Kent County, Public sentiment gradually changed toward tax supported schools.

In the decade of 1860, there were four schools operating in Milford. The Academy on Second Street in north Milford was the best known public school. Reverend J. Leighton McKim ran the best known private school on Northwest Front Street. It was called Milford High School. Its administration stressed an authoritarian and practical philosophy of the strictest discipline and advanced curricula. The Freedmen's Bureau provided funds to build the third school near the African Methodist Episcopal Church on the corner of Fourth and West Streets. The school was to provide education for ex-slaves. The Delaware Association of the Moral Improvement and Education of Colored People paid the salaries of teachers, while the parents of the pupils were responsible for boarding them. Little is known of the fourth school other than its location on Montgomery Street between Front and Second Streets.

Early Milford, because of its unique geographical location in two counties and its division by the Mispillion River, had developed almost as two separate towns. The existence of a North Milford School and a South Milford School served only to emphasize the division of the town.

The North Milford School was an outgrowth of the old Academy and the public school which took its place after 1846. Classes were held for many years in the original brick structure. According to several citizens who were pupils there, the school contained two large rooms on the first floor and a large room on the second. In 1887, Principal Daniel S. Ells reported 123 students in attendance taught by four teachers in the building valued at $2,000.00. Principal Charles Allen reported in the same year that 221 students attended his two story frame school in South Milford.

The administration of the two schools in Milford was consolidated in 1877 by the act of the state legislature. A second act in 1899 created an elected school board of twelve members selected from both sides of the river. Such consolidation naturally produced in some minds the idea that Milford should have a single high school instead of the two which continued to be very separate despite legislation passed in Dover.

The discussion of the possibility of a Milford High School, which would bring honor to the town as a whole, would be almost self-supporting and would still furnish the higher branches of education free to those who would take advantage of such an opportunity. Each school graduating seven or eight students yearly and additional fees from nonresident students encouraged the move toward a single high school.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the town made its decision of locating a high school. Following the consolidation of the Milford schools of Kent and Sussex Counties, a location was chosen adjoining the old Academy site at Second and North Streets. Bonds being issued, two story brick additions were connected to the old building. Educationally, the city of Milford had unified.

That unification was further solidified by the establishment of the Alumni Association in 1908. At that time 70 of 116 graduates since 1900 came together to establish the Association. Since then the Association has helped many students achieve further education and has served as an important unifying influence in the Milford community.

The 1919 School Code classified Milford as a special district. This classification, which still continues, allowed the local district to own buildings and exercise some control in tax matters.

In 1920, the district turned its attention to the school for black children which was the two-story frame structure built some sixty-two years before. Funds made available by Pierre S. DuPont were used by the Delaware School Auxiliary Association for the purchase of three and one-third acres of land on the Northern end of North Street where a fine brick building, now called the Benjamin Banneker School, was erected for elementary classes. This building was enlarged in 1936 by the State Board of Education with the addition of manual training and home economics facilities. Instruction by this time extended through the ninth grade level. More land adjoining the original plot was purchased, and building additions over the past few years have included classrooms, a gym, a cafeteria, a library, and a new science room. Graduates of the Banneker school's ninth grade continued their education in consolidated high schools in Milford, Dover, or Georgetown.

In a history of Milford schools prepared for Milford's Founders day celebration in 1949, Mr. Robert Shilling presented a graphic account of the difficulties facing an administrator of a rapidly growing district in the 1920s. He recalled that several additions to the high school which were called temporary threatened to become permanent. With funds made available in 1920 by the Delaware School Auxiliary Association, a one-room frame building was complete between the original building and Second Street, and a two-room structure was placed behind the original brick school to house vocational agriculture and manual training classes.

About the same time the Board of Education purchased the remaining homes which faced North and Third Streets and adjoined the school property. One of the houses was kept to provide the necessary area for the new department of commercial instruction and two other high school classes which were cleared away leaving an open area for activities. Three elementary sections were moved to rented rooms on the first floor of the Masonic Temple on Northwest Front Street, and remained there for several years.

Mr. Shilling pointed out in his article that, in part, the cause of the overcrowded conditions lay in the local school boards compliance with a regulation of the State Board of Regulation that certain consolidations on each side of the river had to be accomplished before approval of a building program and a bond issue could be expected. These conditions were met, and in 1929 on Lakeview Avenue, a three-story brick building was constructed to house a junior-senior high school. This left more space for the expanding elementary grades in the North street building. At this point the town's educational facilities were again divided into two parts by the river.

One year after the Lakeview Avenue School had been occupied, it was enlarged by five rooms with funds made available by the state. As a result of several bond issues, additions, were made to this building in 1942, 1950, 1951, and 1955. Original parts of the structure have recently been renovated and modernized.

With Milford schools feeling their own population explosion, an excellent site for a school was purchased in 1956 at Southeast Third Street and Bridgham Avenue. The following year the Lulu M. Ross Elementary School with twelve classrooms and other facilities was built. It was named for the beloved teacher who had worked for fifty years in the Milford district.

These twelve new classrooms helped to relieve the overcrowded conditions in the elementary sections of the Lakeview Avenue building. The Ross school was expanded in 1958 by the addition of twelve more classrooms, thus completing the plan.

In the spring of 1962, the Nutter property at Northeast Tenth and Walnut Streets was purchased for the site of a new $1.5 million junior high school which will further enable Milford to provide for the education of its young people. It officially became the Milford Senior High School in 1971.

MHS Alumni
c/o Margaux Azzanesi
9 Green Lane
Milford, DE 19963

margaux@dmv.com