This year for the thirty-first anniversary celebration I will discuss Cleveland's appointment in 1870 to the first Board of Managers of the State Normal School at Buffalo.

The State Normal School opened on September 13, 1871. It since has become Buffalo State College. Before this time, teacher training school development was sporadic and scattered. Free public schools became the norm; recognition grew that teachers needed to know something about their pupils and how to teach them.

The normal school movement advocated teachers' training through specialized education for which the state would take responsibility. The maxim of the normal school movement came from Prussia, a worldwide leader in teacher training. An adequate teacher's education focused on not only substance but also method.

The other world leader in teacher training was France; from its experience with l'ecole normale came the U.S. teacher training movement's name.

In the United States, normal schools first appeared in Massachusetts between 1838 and 1839. New York played an important part in this movement, developing an unprecedented linkage between its state education department and its normal schools as well as between its normal schools and the public school system.

Notwithstanding public sentiment, the normal school movement went right ahead and advocated specialized teachers education.

In spite widespread laissez faire attitudes--That Government Is Best Which Governs Least--the normal movement stressed government involvement in the educational process to help professionalize the subject matter of teacher training. The movement's interests did not attract an overwhelming tide of support. In New York its interests threatened a teaching establishment dominated by church-based educators. Predictably the teaching establishment stressed the normal school movement's abrogation of individualism.

The New York teaching establishment agreed to train teachers but through private academies. In 1834, by an act of the state legislature, academies at Potsdam And Canandaigua became state- subsidized to give teachers educational opportunities. This act marked two firsts: first state to provide money for training teachers and first state to involve itself with private institutions to do this public service. The State Board of Regents received authority to spend the money. Allied with vested interests, it did the politic thing and named eight academies, one in each state senatorial district, for development.

By 1841 there existed 16 academies in New York State with new teacher training divisions funded by state monies. They failed, though, when it came to training teachers. The state monies were distributed in the manner of categorical grants. Students continued to receive a classical education and did not linger long at the academies. They might not continue as teachers, either, moving on, e.g., to practice law.

Cleveland, who worked as an untrained teacher assistant to his older brother William at the state-maintained New York Institute for the Blind in New York City from 1853 to 1854, found his teaching experience bleak. He taught the three R's and geography, receiving most of his own literary education this way. Sundays he attended Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church. He and William were too poor for much else.

One of Cleveland's fellow teachers at the Institute for the Blind later reported that he already was considering the study of law. Several U.S. presidents have taught on the elementary or secondary level, including both Fillmore and Cleveland. In their inclination to leave the teaching field for law, Fillmore and Cleveland reflected the experience of many a teacher of their times.

In 1860 normal schools began attracting favorable public opinion. People agreed that teachers needed training and that training produced the best teachers. Between 1866-1867, Buffalo qualified to bid for the location of a state normal school; but the first state normal school was founded in Albany in 1844. Buffalo's entrance into the teacher training scene came after the normal school movement had transformed itself into bricks and mortar. The first State Normal School opened in Albany with 29 pupils of both sexes, 90% of them already teaching. The student body multiplied six-fold between the school's first and second term. It closed its first term with a public examination for which only the male students had a direct responsibility; the reason for exempting women probably rested on their presence, as potential mothers, to take responsibility for their children's minds.

By 1850 each county was entitled to send to Albany normal students equal to twice the number of its assembly members. Like today's national service academies, this practice lent itself to patronage and proved reinforcing. The Albany normal school included an experimental school of 93 students between six and 13 years of age. Two-thirds (58) of these were free pupils by virtue of being fatherless. The organization of the original normal school was overseen by a five-member executive committee--including two lawyers--charged with the school's direct management, discipline and setting the course of instruction.

On July 9, 1866, a City Council Standing Committee on Schools reported favorably but probably invisibly a proposal by teacher education school advocate Jesse Ketchum, Esq., to donate to Buffalo land sided by York, Jersey, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets. In exchange, on the half lot fronting on Jersey, the City would build a normal school as well as contribute $300 per annum for books and prizes to benefit the educational cause.

On November 1, the Erie County Board of Supervisors approved the normal school and appointed a building committee. On November 12, Ketchum executed a deed in return for which the City executed a bond. The City Council appointed a committee to bid in Albany for a state normal school at Buffalo. Despite having established the first property tax-based free public school system in the state and employing more teachers than any other city in the state except New York, Buffalo, a city of nearly 80,000 people, the state's third largest, did not prevail. Its bid failed on November 20; but, the state board recommended that a special law be passed to authorize a Buffalo normal school. Buffalo state assemblyman R.L. Burrows introduced the bill which passed on April 22, 1867, after he resolved conflict over state support.

On May 4, 1867, three commissioners were appointed to serve in effect as a building committee. The commissioners included Oliver G. Steele, Esq., the former school superintendent who had served on the county-appointed building committee, and the Reverend Dr. A.T. Chester, who had chaired that committee.

U.S. District Court Judge Nathan K. Hall, a member of a predecessor firm to Bass Cleveland and Bissell, also had been a member of the original building committee. In a procedure specified by the County resolution of November 1, 1866, the commissioners chose Dennis Bowen, Esq., as Judge Hall's successor. The Commissioners of the Normal School had at their disposal $45,000 in county appropriations, $45,000 from city-issued bonds and the Ketchum site. On April 15, 1869, the cornerstone for the normal school was laid.

Cleveland had trained in Dennis Bowen's firm but, more than that, Bowen served as his mentor. He was worth having as a mentor. Between 1860 and 1870, Bowen had compiled the largest personal clientage of any Buffalo lawyer. Although not a trial lawyer, he wrote briefs and gave highly trusted advice to banks and business corporations. Bowen avoided publicity and mastered details, traits also characterizing Cleveland all his professional life. The honesty of the reform-minded Bowen preceded him as Cleveland's dogged integrity did him. Customarily Bowen concerned himself with issues of right and wrong rather than with seizing the legal advantage.

On September 16, 1870, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction appointed the normal school's first local Board of Managers, also known as the Board of Trustees. Exercising joint control with the state superintendent, the board had nine members, including the now Honorable Grover Cleveland. The Honorable before Cleveland's name signified his election as sheriff, but he did not actually take that office until January 1, 1871.

Bowen's interest in Cleveland and Cleveland's growing public visibility combined to make him imminently appointable. In every respect, he stood on the side of the day's public issues most likely to benefit his ambition.

Also on the managing board were Bowen and Cleveland associates Francis H. Root, the son of counselor John Root, and Albert H. Tracy, the son of Albert H. Tracy, Sr., a Buffaloian who served 1829-1837 in the state senate, a constituent part of the state's highest court, the Court for the Correction of Errors. For public consumption, Cleveland often expressed his disapproval of 'politicking' in order to stress his disdain for Stalwart Republican party bosses in the 1870s. Nor did Buffalo school politics become nonpartisan until 1892. Cleveland behaved accordingly.

Nine managing board members, three commissioners, three anointments for each commissioner--we safely may conclude that Cleveland's appointment to the Board of Managers was both partisan and nongratuitous. Because he was a law, order and property man his was a good appointment. Cleveland had the right answers on call. "He prided himself on being a practical man who met the issues and problems as they arose"e; . Not only did he appreciate fiscal management and integrity, he also knew firsthand the difficulties of the untrained teacher and the frustration of self-training for the Bar. As an attorney he appreciated method, the centerpiece of teacher training. He recognized the limits of his own legal training as a reader and copyist and, as a result, the limitations of his legal career. And, he understood that ephemeral quality, the common good.

We know that the Board of Managers appointed the normal school's first principal, Professor Henry B. Buckham. On September 13, 1871, the normal school opened with 86 students, 87% of them female. It offered a two year program. By then, teaching had become a woman's profession. The School of Practice included 195 students, 20 from each of the ten grades in the public schools Practice school students were allotted from each public school in Buffalo. The schools each had two desks to fill.

If the allotments reflected the city schools' ethnic composition, a very big 'if,' then practice school students would have been half German, 27% 'American' and 13% Irish, with other nationalities among the remaining 10%. One-half of 1% would have been colored children with all the rest white.

Nominations to the practice school came upon application by parents to the managing board, which nominated students as a form of patronage. The City Superintendent appointed students to the practice schools from the board's nominations. We may feel sure the city's German wards received their fair allotment because one subject taught at the practice school was German.

The formal opening of the normal school came on October 25, 1871. We do not know if Cleveland attended. In 1873 the normal school's first class graduated, thoroughly informed on the three R's, about which they themselves on admission probably were not clear; each class member had received one year of professional studies as well.

Today all that remains on a campus removed from its original site, to remind us that Grover Cleveland served, is the Buffalo State College administration building, Cleveland Hall.


For more information on Professor Slavin's entire presentation "Stephen Grover Cleveland, Trustee: The Board of Managers of the State Normal School at Buffalo, NY, 1870", contact her at:

Buffalo State College
Classroom Building, Room 215
1300 Elmwood Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14222