TOWNSHIP OF WASHINGTON, N.J.—Does this place look familiar? If you live in the Township of Washington, you have probably been there many times without knowing its history.
This one-room wooden building was constructed in 1902 and was the township’s first schoolhouse. It is now incorporated into the town hall overlooking Pascack Road.
At the time the school was built, the population of the rural township was around 60 people. That’s not a typo! The number of residents recorded in the 1900 census was just 60. Because the township was not along the Pascack Valley railroad line, it was much slower to develop than neighboring communities like Hillsdale and Westwood. The township did not see its population boom until the years after World War II.
In 1906 there were 30 pupils at the one-room schoolhouse. There was a single teacher in charge of this group that spanned the full range of grammar school grades. The little square school was nicknamed “the cracker box.” It had a bell that could be heard across town to summon the children to class.
In a news article from 1962, Charles Johnson, a Manhattan Avenue resident who had attended the schoolhouse in the early 1900s, tells the story of the day in 1907 when a stray bullet came flying into the classroom. Two local farmers were having a feud and had begun shooting at one another.
The teacher was having none of that. She calmly pulled a revolver out of her desk and fired a few shots back at the men. Johnson also recalled the rattling windows and a limited heating system. Children would rotate seats to get near the furnace.
In the late 1920s, the township began paying tuition to send its students to the public school in Westwood, for a larger and more modern school. The arrangement continued for 30 years before Washington Elementary was built in 1957.
The “cracker box” became a meeting space for all types of events. In 1934, taxpayers approved a renovation that saw it converted into the official town hall. In the early 1990s, a plan for a new municipal facility was approved. The expansion not only incorporated the original schoolhouse, but also added a wing modeled after the existing 1902 building. The new complex was dedicated in 1997 and is still in use.
