Imagine photographer Marie Kendall in a long skirt climbing Canaan Mountain with all her gear—view camera, lenses, tripod, dark cloth, glass plate negatives—and you’ll have some idea of the difficulties she faced to get this shot of West Norfolk about 1890. Ashpohtag Road stretches into the distance through hills that have been stripped bare, the trees providing fuel to make charcoal for the iron industry. Although the large tannery near the northwest corner of the intersection is now gone, the cluster of houses looks familiar more than a century later. In the middle ground is the one-room schoolhouse with its distinctive cupola. One of ten district schools that served Norfolk in 1900, it had an enrollment of eighty students, far too many for its modest size. Such crowded conditions prompted Carl and Ellen Battell Stoeckel to fund an addition designed by George Keller, architect of the Norfolk Library. This resulted in the only two-room schoolhouse in the outlying districts. 

—Ann Havemeyer

Photo courtesy of the Norfolk Historical Society