The North School

248 Congress Street

Looking down India St. from the Maine Jewish Museum and on the left corner with Congress Street is an apartment block offering subsidized housing for seniors. But at the turn of the 20th century it was the North School.

North School was built in 1867. It replaced the Congress Street Grammar School that was built in the 1820s. It was destroyed in the Great Fire of Portland, that occurred on July 4, 1866—the second Independence Day after the end of the American Civil War. Five years before the Great Chicago Fire, this was the greatest fire yet seen in an American city. 1,800 buildings were razed, most between Hobson’s Wharf on Commercial Street, where it started, and Munjoy Hill, where it burned out. Subsequently, brick was the material of choice, as in this building.

By 1900, public school was compulsory in Maine, and by the 1920s, students represented at least twenty nationalities or ethnicities. Since classes were taught in English, Jewish children from Yiddish-speaking families would often learn English before their parents did.

In the 1910s, Jewish students such as Barney Shur (see Stop E06), were a large minority. For example, in 1912, there were 36 students in Miss Lilian M. Conneen’s fifth year class. Fourteen of those students (or 39%) were Jewish. This can be seen in the beautiful class attendance records for the Jewish High Holy Days. One of the photos above shows a page from these records (housed at the Maine Historical Society) for September 1912. Yom Kippur (September 20-21) was on a weekend that year, so Jewish students didn’t have to miss any school. But for Rosh Hashanah (September 12-13), Sukkot (September 26-27) and Shemini Atzeret/ Simchat Torah (October 3-4), 100% of Jewish students were marked absent from school.

The school’s staff and programs reflected the neighborhood it served. Like Miss Conneen (1861-1963), many of the teachers at the North School were Irish women from the neighborhood. Portland’s first Black public school teacher also purportedly taught at the North School. The school offered manual training programs located in the school’s attic space and a school savings bank program. Both programs were developed to help educate the large numbers of immigrant and first-generation students, including Irish, Jewish and Italian, and Black children, who all lived at different times in the India Street neighborhood and on Munjoy Hill.

The North School closed in the mid-1970s and in the mid-1990s was converted by the City of Portland into the apartments you see today. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and included in the India Street Historic District in 2015.