As part of the celebration of the bicentennial of Cortland County, Homer Central School is proud to recognize that its history as an educational institution stretches back 189 years this month. Cortland County's first application for an institution of higher learning (beyond that of the "common school") was made in 1817 by 21 men of Homer, eighteen of whom agreed to be the Trustees (or Board of Education) of the Homer Academy. Saturday, February 2, 2008, marked the 189th year since the requested Charter was granted by the Regents of the State of New York in 1819, bearing the signature of Chancellor John Tayler. The State required the name be changed to Cortland Academy, and when Homer demonstrated it could provide a building on the Village Green, courtesy of the First Religious Society of Homer, and the funds to launch this historic endeavor, the Academy became one of the first twenty incorporated academies in the state. This was just eleven years after Cortland County was created.
John Osborn, one of the first Trustees, resided on Albany Street in Homer and was a member of the Underground Railroad and Abolition Movement. His grandson, William Osborn Stoddard, was born there in 1835, and, at age ten, discovered his grandfather was harboring a fugitive slave. Educated at the Academy, Stoddard went on to serve as President Lincoln's assistant personal secretary during the Civil War. With his abolitionist leanings, he did not object when asked to make copies of Lincoln's controversial Emancipation Proclamation that set free slaves in the rebel states.
Another Trustee and prominent merchant of Homer was Jedidiah Barber. He and his son, Paris, were influential in the development of another student of the Academy, Francis Bicknell Carpenter, who was born north of the village in 1830. They supported Carpenter in his dream to become a portrait painter. It is Carpenter who went on to spend six months at the White House working on the huge oil painting depicting "The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet." It was his good friend, Stoddard, who used his political connections to arrange for the painting to hang in the Capitol building in the nation's capital. Modern day Lincoln scholar, Harold Holzer, has credited Homer's Carpenter with being "the most important artist ever to portray Abraham Lincoln."
A third Trustee of note, the Reverend John Keep, pastor of the Congregational Church, lobbied successfully in 1824 for the Academy to offer a co-educational program. Quite the progressive, his zealous and outspoken advocacy of abolition in the 1830s did not sit well with the economic conservatives of the community who traded with the slaveholders of Maryland. Moving on to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1833, Keep helped to establish Oberlin College and is said to have cast the deciding vote in the decision to allow both blacks and women to attend what has become a prestigious American college.
From these early roots, the school on the Green blossomed. In its first twenty-five years, over 4000 students passed through its portals. Through later years, and after three fires, it changed its structural appearance and its name: Cortland Academy, Homer Academy, and Homer Academy and Union School. In 1946, the Academy merged with one-room school districts in the area, and the Homer Central School District was formed. Later, other school buildings were constructed in the village, the District consolidated with the Truxton School, and capital projects have kept pace with increasing enrollments and needs for technological improvements.
Over the next two years, the District and its students have much to celebrate. This month of February is nationally designated Black History Month. 2008 is the 200th birthday of Cortland County. 2009 will mark the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln scholar, Harold Holzer, has agreed to come to Homer in May of 2009 to speak of Homer's connection to "The Great Emancipator." When you connect the historic dots, as Holzer has done, Homer Central School, proud custodian of the rare Charter and "Indenture" of 1819 and of Carpenter's portraits of the original Trustees, is pleased to play a part in all these timely celebrations.
In an age that seems to place little value upon connections between people and upon connections with the past, the Homer Central School District takes seriously the opening lines of its "Alma Mater":
"There’s a grand old school in Homer,
That is known afar and wide;
As we sing its praises over,
Our hearts are filled with pride…."
Today, in the 21st century, we in Homer call it "Blue Pride."
More information on "Homer's Celebration of Lincoln in Paint and Print"
Additional historical details of the Homer Academy and Union School can be found here.
