Many of my relatives have attended the school at the site just down the road from The Ridge Road House.
This school, now Vermont State University, evolved from the Orange County Grammar School (1806) into the Randolph Normal School (1866) into the Aggie School (The Vermont School of Agriculture 1910) into the Vermont Agricultural and Technical Institute (1957) into Vermont Technical College (1962) until its present name change.
My first relative who attended this school was my Great Grandmother Josephine (Josie) Farrar Gray Perry. I knew her as Grammy Perry. She went to the Randolph Normal School to become a teacher.
I was recently reading a letter she wrote at age 98 to the Normal School after they requested some news from her. She told them about a move from Vermont to Florida when she was a young wife with her husband. This inspired me to do more research using 1907 archived Florida newspapers which led me to new facts about my family during their short-lived move from Vermont. What if they had stayed in Florida? My grandfather might not have met my grandmother in Vermont. I wouldn’t be here today.
Harry Cooley and Charles Cooley (both owners of The Ridge Road House) taught at the site- Harry at the Aggie School, as he called it, and Charles at VTC.
Photo of The Randolph Normal School ~1894 taken from "Early Photographs of RANDOLPH, VERMONT 1855-1948," by Wes Herwig, 1986, Greenhills Books, Randolph Center, Vermont
About the term "Normal School-" in the 1830s the term Normal School was in use for schools that were formerly known as teacher seminaries (today, the modern-day University Education programs for teacher training). The term may come from the French école normale meaning a model school (norma from the Latin meaning a carpenter's square, therefore a rule or model.)[1]
Letter from Josie Perry to the Normal School Annual Meeting when she was 98 years old in 1971
[1] Duling, Ennis, “A Persistent and Spirited Controversy: The State Normal Schools and the Education of Vermonters,” Vermont Historical Society, 2022, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://vermonthistory.org/journal/90/VH90_02_Duling.pdf (31, December, 2023)
Gertrude Small Cooley, my grandmother, was also a graduate of the Randolph Normal School. My mother said she was an excellent teacher. Lots of teachers in the Cooley family! I learned some things about that school from this post. And the letter from your great-grandmother—what a treasure. Did you know that there is also a Florida chapter in the Cooley family history? It began with William and Anna and included Sumner and Emerson.