To "E" or not To "E"

Stoney Creek School 

Date Visited:  July 21, 2019

Stop:  #23

At this point, it only seems appropriate that we have a lesson in spelling.  Afterall, our next visit was to the schoolhouse built for the children who lived at Stoney Creek Village.  If you have read my two prior blogs, you may have noticed something strange, or confounding, about this area.  It constantly baffled me to the point where I had to finally look it up in Google to see if they could shed any light on the subject.  In the various signs scattered about this area, you will notice that there are two different spellings used to describe this area – Stony and Stoney!!  With or without the E. Why? Why is the creek called Stony Creek while the village is called Stoney Creek? Why does the historical marker describing the history of the masons in this area refer to the Stony Creek Lodge while the historical marker describing the history of the village, a mere 305 feet away, refers to the area as the Stoney Creek Village.  I could not rationally explain this away in my mind, so I turned to Google to get an answer, and sure enough, I was provided one, albeit a very unsatisfying answer. But at least I know now that I am not imagining things. The best way to describe what is going on is to just provide you with a link to the article I found but suffice it to say, either spelling is acceptable and used interchangeably.  For more details on this, read the article at https://www.rochesterhills.org/DocumentCenter/Home/View/1077.  

So, are you satisfied with the answer?  I’m not so sure that I am. I was hoping for something more intriguing, but it is a bit comical that this issue, if you can call it that, has been going on for nearly 200 years.

The school, located on the eastern edges of the historic Stoney Creek Village, is a popular place to visit.  The Rochester area schools have offered a program for years where third grade students spend a couple of days at the school, wearing appropriate period-age clothes, and learning what it was like to go to school during the 1800’s and the history of that era.  They actually use McGuffey Readers, slates, and copybooks.

The first schoolhouse was built in 1825, but it burned to the ground and was replaced by the current school in 1848, nineteen years after the Stoney Creek School District was created.  Like many one-room schoolhouses of the times, children of all ages and grades (elementary through high school) attended classes here. It remained that way until 1931 when the high school students began to attend Rochester High School.   The first school teacher at Stoney Creek School was John Chapman, who was a mathematician. He taught several subjects during a typical school day, including spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, and physiology.  A school year consisted of two semesters – a winter semester, usually taught by a man, and a summer semester, usually taught by a woman. The two most prominent people to attend this school were Bertha Van Hoosen and Sarah Van Hoosen Jones, both of whom I wrote about in my previous blog.

The northern wing was added in 1952, but shortly after its completion, the Stoney Creek District Number 1 chose to join the Rochester Community School District, and the schoolhouse was closed.  It was used periodically over the years to help with overcrowding in a nearby elementary school. The schoolhouse was restored in 1976 and re-opened in 1982 as a living history classroom for third graders in the Rochester area.  Both my kids had the opportunity to participate in this learning experience and remains one of their favorite childhood memories.

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