Mount Hanley Schoolhouse Museum
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| Established | 1963 |
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| Location | Mount Hanley, Annapolis County, Nova Scotia Canada |
| Type | community schoolhouse museum |
| Website | [1] |
The Mount Hanley Schoolhouse Museum is a community museum located in a historic one-room school in Mount Hanley, Annapolis County, Nova Scotia. The Museum focuses on the history of Mount Hanley and surrounding communities as well as rural school life and the famous mariner Joshua Slocum who attended the school in the 1850s.
The school was built in 1850. It replaced an earlier log schoolhouse and became officially known as “The Mount Hanley School Section No. 10”. The school house was part of a large-scale expansion of rural schools in Nova Scotia in the 1850s led by the province’s first Superintendent of Schools, William Dawson. An early famous student was Joshua Slocum who was born on a farm just to the west of the school. Slocum learned to read and write at the school, attending until he was eight years old when his family moved to Brier Island in 1854. Another significant student was Clara Belle Marshall, who in 1884 became the first woman to graduate from Acadia University. A Mount Hanley student who followed in her footsteps was Ora Blossom Elliott who graduated from Acadia University in 1906 and wrote a valuable history of early Mount Hanley in 1909. A small community library was established in the school in the 1930s. The school taught all grades until 1949 when students who passed Grade Six began to attend the newly built Middleton Regional High School. The Mount Hanley School closed in 1963 when rural schools were consolidated into larger schools in town. Henceforth, Mount Hanley children were bused to a new elementary school in Lawrencetown.
Alton and Laurette Barteaux, who lived beside the school, bought the building and all its contents when it closed in 1963. They established a private museum named the Mount Hanley Schoolhouse Museum. As the school’s contents were never dispersed, the Barteaux family was able to preserve all the books, desks, maps and fittings of 124 years of schooling including school registers dating back to 1894. They added artifacts from other school houses in the area as well as artifacts from Mount Hanley families. The Museum was open by appointment and over the years was featured in several books about Joshua Slocum. In 1995 the school was registered as a provincial heritage property, earning provincial significance as an especially well preserved early schoolhouse in addition to the association with Joshua Slocum and Clara Belle Marshall.
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