Went to school in Jan. Feb. & Mar. School was out Mar. 30 Had our graduating exercises on the night of the 31st. Got 6 present. Five books & a bouquet.
Jesse James Bench begins his diary noting that he graduated from Utica Public School in Livingston County on March 31, 1900. He had just turned 20. In 1900 rural Missouri, few students attended school beyond the 8th grade, so Jesse’s high school diploma was unusual for the time. Five other students graduated with Jesse: Edith Baltis Stone, Oletha Brown, Hattie Flinn, Arthur Wilson, and Laura Norton.
His sister Sofia Elizabeth Bench Smith gave Jesse a book of poems by Whittier. Jesse received a matching book of poems by Longfellow, but the page denoting who gave it to him fell out. Randall, Sophia’s 10 year-old boy, gave Jesse a copy of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Mrs. Jane White gave him Lowell’s Early Poems, and in the same series, Miss Lena Mills gave Jesse a collection titled Favorite Poems.
Other books from Jesse’s library consist of high school paperbacks titled Riverside Literature Series. He read “Evangeline” by Longfellow, “Snow-Bound Among the Hills” and “Songs of Labor” by Whittier, The Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale, and a book of poems by Longfellow including “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
The public school Jesse and his siblings attended was built in 1867. In 1900, the Utica Herald stated:
Utica has a five-room brick building, commodious and well ventilated, situated on high and healthy ground, in the very center of the town. No more beautiful site could be found than that which the building now occupies. While our course of study is as high or higher than the ordinary village school, approaching more nearly an academic course, we do not pride ourselves so much on what we teach as how we teach. Not how much, but how well is our motto. The young man or woman, finding the country schools inadequate, will certainly find the Utica schools just what is needed. To prepare for entering college, completing an under-graduate course or for preparing for teaching, the Utica schools have no peer in towns of its size. It gives you an open door to the normals and universities.
Jesse’s children and several of his grandchildren attended the same school, but it was destroyed by combustion fire in 1944.
Thank you to the Livingston County Library and Darlene Cole for the webpage on Utica’s history.
