Footnotes to Long Island History
The Old Eight Sided
Schoolhouse In Yaphank
by
Thomas R. Bayles
Yaphank had
the most unusual schoolhouse on Long Island a hundred years ago, which
was a building, octagonal in shape, with a cupola in the center for
light and ventilation. William J. Weeks was the prime mover in the
erection of this school, and his own residence down the road near the
Episcopal church was built in the same octagonal shape. This old school
house served the village until 1926, when the present one on Main street
was built on the same site in front of the old one.
The first
schoolhouse was built a quarter of a mile north of the corner of the
Middle Island road shortly after the districts were formed in 1813, and
Beecher Homan has this to say about it in his book, “Yaphank As It Is,”
published in 1875. For many years the young ideas of the past
generation struggled to master the rustic classics in a little red
painted, boxed up shanty, bearing the name of a school house, that stood
in an old field in the most extreme part of Upper Yaphank. There
“Squire Homan once ruled up the pupils, and William C. Booth explained
the mysteries of the half explored globe.”
Yaphank was
active in the middle of the past century, with a Presbyterian church
built in 1851, and Episcopal church in 1853, and a new schoolhouse and a
Baptist church in 1854.