Faulkner Kindergarten Teacher

Teacher at the Faulkner Kindergarten in North Billerica, a free kindergarten opened on December 1, 1897 by Miss Abby Faulkner and her sisters, daughters of James R. and Catharine Rogers Faulkner, in memory of their parents. Their cousin Miss Harriet Rogers, former principal of the Clarke School for the Deaf at Northampton, arranged the school and served as its director for nineteen years. It opened with Isabelle Houliston as principal and eighteen children; attendance doubled the next year and an assistant teacher was added. The kindergarten was privately endowed and managed (later under a trust) and was never part of the town school system, but it was free to any Billerica child, and the town school reports list it as a private school with its teachers. By 1940 it was housed in the Faulkner Homestead on Spaulding Street, with a Nursery group for three-year-olds and a Kindergarten group for four-year-olds meeting each weekday morning.

Sources: Billerica annual town reports 1899-1909 (school teacher lists), 1916, 1922 (history by principal Annie M. Griffin), 1923, 1925, 1926, 1940 and 1944 (reports of the kindergarten).