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The Preparation
17

Friends' School, the Hicksite split had not occurred, and of course the Hicksite meeting house—adjoining the Orthodox meeting house at Fallsington to this day—had not been built. The schoolhouse attached to the original meeting house of the Friends was built about the middle of the eighteenth century.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, about 1815, Jonathan Palmer was the principal teacher of this school, a man said to have been uncommonly well-educated for that day. He was supported partly by the Friends' Meeting, and partly by the farmers who sent their children to be educated.

The sessions of the school were held six days in the week—in the morning from eight to twelve, and in the afternoon from one to five o'clock, except in winter, when they closed an hour earlier. During the eleventh and first months (November and January), the girls were kept at home at work, to make room for the boys at school; in the fourth and fifth months (April and May) the boys were obliged to stay home in order to give the girls a chance; and during the seventh and eighth