Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Wolcott History – Addin Lewis

In my blog about the stories behind the names of the schools in Wolcott I gave a brief bio of Addin Lewis. While Lewis School was torn down nearly 50 years ago, I’d like to give some further details about him, especially since there is no write-up in the Wolcott History website like there is for the other four people for whom schools are named.

Addin was born in 1780 in the southeast corner of Farmingbury (as it was then known) as the fourth child of Captain Nathaniel and Sarah (Gridley) Lewis. He married Fanny Lewis (the daughter of his second cousin and the widow of Anson Judd) and had three daughters, but all of them died young.

His early education was at the South School (when he graduated from there it was still called Farmingbury). (His father, Nathaniel, was one of the members of the School Committee of Farmingbury and was the representative of the South School.) The support for the schools was “by the poll”, i.e. parents paid for their children in proportion to the number of pupils and the number of days in attendance. Under this system it was often quite difficult for some parents to pay their school bills and thus many children were educated very little. At the time, wages for the average man were six to ten dollars a month and for a woman one dollar week, so a school bill of eighty-eight dollars for the year was a very substantial burden.

After finishing his education at the South School, Addin then went to Yale College in New Haven. In 1804, at the age of 24, he accepted a position as Instructor/Tutor at the University of George in Athens, GA and remained there for four years. During this time he gained such a reputation and esteem that he was appointed the first Collector of the District of Mobile, without even applying for the position. The importance of this position induced him to accept it and he became the chief representative of the general government. At the same time he filled the office of Postmaster and later became Mayor of the city and President of the local bank. He served as mayor from 1822 to 1823 and 1824 to 1827.

As the years passed he became identified with all the public interests of the city and amassed quite a fortune. But having suffered for several years of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis), and being weary of the long hours needed for public service, he retired from all those duties after his final year as mayor. For several years prior he had spent summers in Connecticut and the winters in the South. But having become quite deaf as well, he returned to New Haven permanently in 1827. His wife died in 1832 and he also died there in 1842 at the age of 63.

When he died, he left, by bequest, $8500 to the town of Wolcott, the interest to be used for the support of public schools. He also left nearly $15,000 to the School Society of Southington and $5,000 to the President and Fellows of Yale College. I detailed in the prior blog how there were also conditions attached to the funds left to the School Society of Southington regarding allowing up to ten men each year to attend that school (subsequently named the Lewis Academy) tuition-free.


The $8500 left by Addin can best be put into perspective by its proportion to the total costs of the schools of Wolcott at the time. It generated about $500 a year and was to be distributed to each of the school districts “in proportion to the number of children” in that school, providing that the school district raised an equal sum. In the history of Wolcott, by Samuel Orcutt in 1874, it was noted that in the prior year in addition to the $500 from the Addin Lewis fund, the schools received $220 from State appropriation, and $130 from the Town of Wolcott. The actual expenses of all the schools combined was about $1200 that year. That meant that parents only had to pay a total of $350 instead of $1200, so 70% of the cost of educating their children was provided from these other sources. That had a tremendous impact on the number of families who could afford to educate their children.

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