A long time Marple resident donated several old high school diplomas to the Historical Society last week, one for a Marple school and one for Newtown High School. Neither of the schools was a “Marple-Newtown” school, because that idea was realized several years later.
Edna May Dickinson graduated from Newtown High School on June 1, 1911. Commencement was held in Newtown Hall, the community gathering spot for social affairs from 1868 until 1955, when it was demolished to make room for a wider West Chester Pike. Town Hall was at the southeast corner of Rt. 252 and West Chester Pike. The school that served as the elementary school and high school was just a few blocks south on Rt 252 – and that school building remains, though unrecognizable as the 1896 red brick school. In that building of three rooms, three teachers taught ten grades, including a two-year high school curriculum.
Edna May had completed the prescribed studies in orthography, reading, penmanship, arithmetic, geography, history, grammar, physiology and hygiene. She was one of several speakers at commencement, and chose as her topic “Some Needed Inventions.” Her speech did not get handed down with her diploma, and so we are left to wonder what new inventions Edna dreamed of and proposed to her fellow graduates. She was a class officer, the secretary, and after graduation secured a job as a stenographer in Media. The family moved to Media, and Edna lived out her days at a house on N. Jackson Street in Media with her brother Thomas. Neither of them married, and both died in 1965.
The whole graduating class of 1911 may have been those students named in the newspaper article that chronicled the event. And it was an event – in a small farming community, the high school graduation was a celebration – the children of Newtown had been educated and were being sent off to do great things with their lives. Local dignitaries were in attendance, including Dr. John G. Thomas, who a few years later offered his land on West Chester Pike for the erection of a new building to be used by Newtown and Marple townships as a joint school, the Marple Newtown High School. The current Gauntlet Center property was the Thomas farm, but in 1914 the first Marple Newtown High School was built there, and welcomed the high school aged students from both communities. We’ve been together ever since.
For more history on Newtown Square, Delaware County, and membership information, please visit our website at nshistory.org.
