WHEN WE WERE NORMAL
A Historical Augmented Reality Walking Tour
Keeping Middle School Boys Busy
LOCATION: BY PERC 209
In the spring of 1910 Percival Hall officially opened. At the time, the building was called the Manual Arts School, Practical Arts Building, or simply the Junior High School. In addition to serving as a junior high school for the local children of Fitchburg, it also was designed as a practice school for the Practical Arts students of the Normal School. Combining these two programs in one building had immediate effects on the junior high school curriculum.
During the 1910s, Percival Hall contained one shop room in the attic and one in the basement for Practical Arts students of the normal school. There was also a suite for household arts, three shops for the middle school boys, seven classrooms, and a 600 seat auditorium equipped for moving pictures.
Students in the middle school could choose four courses of study: Literary Course for those going on to High School, Commercial Course for students interested in working in business, Practical Arts for future tradesmen, and Household Arts for girls.
These Practical Arts students learned a number of trades including bookbinding and printing. They would print, bind, color, and illustrate the annual catalogs for the Normal School with students in the Junior High School. For instance, the 1912-1913 catalog was printed and bound by seventh and eighth grade students with the help of Normal School students.
Illustrations were done by Normal School senior, Stanley Blanchard, and hand coloring of illustrations were done by fourth grade students and the Normal School students working in that grade.
Students were encouraged to think of their work as serving the community, to look for what needed to be done, and to exercise initiative to do it themselves. To that end, the students did all sorts of work around campus.
They canned fruit, cooked for the dormitory, sharpened lawn mower blades, caned chairs, graded the athletic field, grew vegetables, made bookcases, repaired broken windows, painted classrooms, sewed typewriter covers, built a picket fence, built a bicycle shed, and laid wood flooring.
Its emphasis on teaching practical skills set Fitchburg and its Practical Arts program apart from the other schools in the nation. The Practical Arts program in Fitchburg played a key role in turning these boys into responsible citizens that contributed to their communities.