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• 2006-06-14 16:53 Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 800×522×8 (197003 bytes)
• 2006-06-14 16:47 Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 372×428×8 (252118 bytes) School photograph from Westbrookville area circa 1908-1910. Photograph from the collection of Ralph Freudenberg (1903-1980) and Nora Belle Conklin (1902-1963). Nora Belle Conklin (1902-1963) has been tentatively identified as the second person from the left in the bottom row with the ribbon in her hair..

Blyden Potts writes in 2007: One, was this the Lower Pine Kill or Upper Pine Kill school house? The lower school house was located right in Westbrookville on the lower end of the Lower Kill Rd, roughly across from where the firehouse is now, and the building is, I believe, still standing. The upper school house was located near where the upper end of the Upper Pine Kill Rd and Lower Pine Kill Rd join, i.e. near “Culvertown”, but no longer exists. I don’t know what the upper school looked like, and my memory of the lower school is not sharp, but judging from the picture, this looks consistent with what the lower school house looks like. Of course, if the upper school house was similar build….

Two, I notice that three girls in the front row are all wearing similar dark bows in their hair. One of them is the second child from the left who you identify as probably being Nora Belle Conklin. Could all three be from the same household? In that case, the fourth one in might be Flossie Skinner, and the fifth one of her sisters. Unfortunately I don’t have the dates for all the siblings to make a good guess, but perhaps you have?

Three, do you know who the Black boy is? Doing a 1910 Town of Mamakating Census index search for race=Black, I only came up with one African-American family in the entire township, the family of Robert Free. They had 3 daughters and 1 son, Willie, b. abt 1900 so he would probably have been about 9 years old at the time of the photo. Seems like a good guess that the boy in this photo might be him.

Four, I went through my files to consider who some of the other people I have are who might be in this photo (depending on which school it was) and their approximate age circa 1909:

Nellie Benedict (abt 5) Bill Benedict Jr. (abt 6) Genevieve Page (abt 7) Franklin Harrison Piatt (abt 7) Harold Ashworth (abt 7) Florence Elnora Culver (abt 8) Flossie Skinner, who was Nora Belle Conklin's half-sister (abt 8) Mary Benedict (abt 8) Mabel Racine (abt 9) Inez McDowell (abt 9) Gladys Irene Piatt (abt 10) Asa McDowell (abt 10) George E. Culver (abt 11)