Old South End School

Southie
Old South End School, Southington (Location)
June 2025

Connecticut museum visit #545.

I’ve been on a run of one-room schoolhouse museums lately. I’m very happy that each and every preserved building is preserved. These little museums are cool glimpses into small town Connecticut history. But, since I decided I’d try to write about each of these places in a way that is somewhat entertaining, it gets difficult.

They’re literally all the same. Granted, normal people don’t visit non-hometown one-room schoolhouses. Why would they? This particular one is here for Southington people to talk about old-timey Southington things. (And for elementary Southington kids to learn about old timey Southington things.)

It’s not open to the public very often, but I caught it during Connecticut’s annual Open House Day in June.

This is an attractive old schoolhouse. There are two others in Southington: a similar one on West Street that has been condemned (but the Historical Society is attempting to fix it up) and a newer, larger one at Marion and School Streets. I’m not sure what will come of that one, but as far as CTMQ is concerned, probably nothing.

The South End one was “built sometime after 1810, when the original and smaller schoolhouse on the site, built around 1760, burned down.” It was used as a school all the way until 1955 when the town’s South End Elementary School opened. If you were wondering, the Old South End School, near today’s South End Elementary, is on South End Road and is in the southern part of Southington, which is so named because it was the “South Society of Farmington.”

They have the desks and the pot-bellied stove and the chalkboard and the old primers and the teacher’s salary sheet and the dunce cap. Classic old one-room schoolhouse museum stuff. As I poked around, the docents kept track of the little kids running around – their grandchildren. I was asked if I had any questions and I actually did!

That’s when I learned about the dilapidated West Street Schoolhouse and the hopeful attitude toward its restoration.

And then I left.

(Did you expect more from this? Sorry. There are just a lot of one-room schoolhouses in our state.)