When it was raised and where it stood are interesting questions to which the utmost research does not vouchsafe answers. At any rate, it had grown old or dilapidated in 1737-8; for at a meeting of freeholders held in that year it was resolved that "the public pound should be where the old school-house stood." The new school-house was built on the highway, at the northwest corner of the Squire place, and remained there nearly a century.

It was a fundamental law of the New Haven jurisdiction "'that the sonnes of all the inhabitants shall " be learned to write a ledgible hand as soone as they " are capable of it." And when, in 1664, the New Haven colonj' came under the jurisdiction of Connecticut, the law still read much the same, --

"Tlie Select men of every town and precinct wliere they dwell, shall 4iave a vigilant eye over theii' Iirethrt-n and neitjliburs, to see, hint, that none «f them shall sntTer so much barbitrisni in any of their families as

not to endeavor to teach, by themselves or otliers, their children and apjirentices to read the Knglish tongne, under penalty of twenty shillings for each neglect therein. "

It was under the influence of such wholesome laws that the founders of White Plains erected the first school-house in which their children were to be educated; and it is but justice to this intelligent people to say, that the public records prove that, with very few exceptions, the proprietors of White Plains could both read and write. And yet it is of these people Colonel Heathcote wrote, from Scarsdale, under date of November 9, 1705, --