Leverett Center School Watercolor by Georgiana Sargent
Hanging above the door in the “bishop’s study” at Forty Acres is a watercolor painting of the Leverett Central School, a one-room schoolhouse in Leverett, Massachusetts where Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington preached some of his first sermons in 1841. The painting dates to 1895. On the original catalog card for the painting, museum founder James Lincoln Huntington writes “Miss Sargent was cousin of George P. H. She made this watercolor of the schoolhouse...” The painting features a red schoolhouse atop a grassy hill, bright green from the sunlight shining on it. The hill slopes to the left of the frame, and behind it are visible the mountains in the distance, and the blue sky and clouds above them. Towering trees cast a shadow over the schoolhouse. In the bottom corner of the painting is written “Leverett, Aug ‘95, G.W.S.”
Leverett’s Central School at 94 Depot Road was one of many one-room schoolhouses that serviced the Leverett area. Throughout the summer of 1841, Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington preached inside the schoolhouse. “Mr. Huntington seems to have given his first sermon at the House of Correction in East Cambridge, March 22nd, 1841,” wrote Arria Huntington in her 1906 book Memoir and Letters of Frederic Dan Huntington: First Bishop of Central New York. “During the following summer he ministered to a little flock of ‘Liberal Christians’ who gathered in a lonely schoolhouse on the hills above the Connecticut Valley.’”
Leverett’s Central School, built in 1800, served as a schoolhouse in Leverett for 150 years until it was replaced in 1950. The schoolhouse was often referred to as the “Little Red Schoolhouse,” which explains why the building appears red in the painting. Interestingly, though, the schoolhouse is said to have been clad in white-painted clapboards “sometime after 1850”, as is shown in the photograph. Would Georgiana Sargent have known it to be red in her lifetime? Perhaps she was painting the building as it once was. A flagpole in the photo above is also not present on the painting by Georgiana. In 1950, the town of Leverett replaced the still active one-room schoolhouses in the area with Leverett Elementary School. The building presumably still stands on privately owned land and is a part of the Leverett Center Historic District.
Leverett Center School in 1990 from the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System
Flowers by Georgiana Welles Sargent
Miss Sargent AKA G.W.S. is Georgiana Welles Sargent (1858-1946). Georgiana’s father was John Osborn Sargent, whose half-sister was married to Frederic Dan Huntington. Her family lived on 35th Avenue in New York City and had a summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Later she would live in Europe with her family and eventually move back to New England. “Cousin Georgie” was close with the PPH family, often writing letters to the family from various residences.
Georgiana was an avid gardener, painter, and art collector; in 1924 she donated hundreds of prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of her father, John Osborn Sargent. Evidence of her painting practice beyond this watercolor include a sketchbook of floral and landscape paintings among the museum’s collections. The schoolhouse was likely one of many landscape paintings she made in her lifetime. Any connection Georgiana had to the schoolhouse outside of her relation to Frederic Dan Huntington is unknown.
Among the Porter-Phelps-Huntington family papers at UMass Amherst is a photograph of her and some correspondence, and the museum contains numerous artifacts once belonging to her (mostly clothing and everyday objects). Georgiana was said to have been single all her life, though her frequent correspondence and closeness with the family tells us that she never was alone. Georgiana died in 1949, the year that the Porter-Phelps-Huntington house became a museum. She was 91.
Sources:
“Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers.” findingaids.library.umass.edu, http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/mums1148#odd-gws.
Gibavic, Annette. Leverett’s One Room Schools, 2000.
“Historic Building Detail: LEV.19.” MHC. Accessed August 2, 2023. https://mhc-macris.net/details?mhcid=LEV.19.