Bygone Hudson Valley

Recently, I received the attached image of the former one-room Galeville School in the town of Shawangunk from reader Kim Kosteczko of Wallkill, which prompted a closer look into the history of this little building. Standing near the present-day intersection of Albany Post Road and Long Road, the school was constructed in the early 1800s as part of the Galeville District No. 13 of the Town of Shawangunk. It was located next door to the Galeville Methodist church, and most likely housed the church’s Sunday School, as was common among the rural schools at the time.

Today the area known as Galeville is residential, but it once was a thriving hamlet that included a blacksmith shop, a general store, a spoke-making shop, a sawmill and grist mill, a hotel and a post office. A weekly newspaper, The Galeville Weekly Casket, had a brief run in the mid-1800s. The hamlet also served as a stagecoach stop prior to 1868, when the railroad arrived in the nearby hamlet of Wallkill (known then as The Basin). 

Kosteczko notes that the property on which the school stood was once owned by her husband’s family and that her husband’s grandmother, Mary Kosteczko, helped to maintain the building during the 1920s and 1930s. After her husband Mikolaj passed away at the age of 49, the young widow continued to run the family dairy farm while raising seven children. Mary also made sure to tend the woodstove in the school building each morning before the children arrived and made water available for the students to carry to the school. The teacher at that time, Vivian McLean, lived in town and would arrive by horse and wagon; classes would be canceled in the winter when the snow as too high for her to make the trip.

In May of 1938, the tiny school and two of Mary’s children were featured in the Middletown Times Herald.  A picture of six students, along with Mrs. McLean, bore the following caption: “In addition to being one of the oldest district schools in Ulster County, the Galeville School this year has a new claim to distinction – three sets of twins, two of them from one family, among its sixteen pupils. Donna and Dorothy, aged five, and Ruth Ellen and Rosemarie, nine, are twin daughters of Mr. and Mrs. L.W. Myers, who moved here from Oklahoma last November….The other twins are Joseph and Frank Kosteczko, fourteen-year-old sons of Mary Kosteczko. Both of them are in the eighth grade.”

The Galeville School had separate entrances and cloakrooms for boys and girls and a potbellied stove where the teacher would often heat soup for the students during the winter months. According to an account in Elaine Terwilliger Weed’s history One Room Schools of the Town of Shawangunk, 1800-1943, the schoolhouse also had “two outhouses, one for the boys and another for the girls. A solid wooden fence separated them. Both outhouses were ‘three holers’ and had three holes of different sizes.”

During the early to mid-1800s, the Galeville School had a higher enrollment than many of the other rural schools in the area. It was common for 40 or more students in grades 1-8 to be taught by a single teacher. The school served as community center and students actively participated in civic activities including raising money for the Red Cross, hosting a Christmas party for the community and planting trees around the property each year as part of an Arbor Day celebration. They raised funds to sponsor a traveling library from the New York State Education Department and organized Health and Safety and Sewing and Homemaking clubs.

With the arrival of the railroad, according to the late historian Frank Mentz, “the bustling Galeville began to be no more; by 1910 it had become so deteriorated that you never have known that a hamlet was ever there.” Enrollment at the Galeville School declined sharply and only a handful of students were listed on the attendance rosters of the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1930s, most of the rural districts in Ulster County were becoming part of centralized school districts, and Galeville was absorbed into the Wallkill Central School District.

Though they continued to attend classes at Galeville, students at the tiny school contributed articles for the district newspaper and participated in central district activities such as spelling bees and field days. The last class finished the 1942-1943 school year at Galeville before the school shut its doors for the final time. The following year, students were bussed to the central school building in the hamlet of Wallkill. The school building was sold at auction in 1945 and converted into a private residence, which it remains to this day.