Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1872-03-01
The March of Improvement.

Editors Of the Spy: There is a rumor of a
petition in circulation praying the city council
to re.purchase the little brick schoolhouse on
the old common, with view to continuing that
miserably dilapidated building in use for educa-
tional purposes. The officials, some of them the
same, certainly, who dcquieSced in the throwing
away of 900 recently, in order to substitute for
the original mode of warming the new high
school house, plan by which the unoccupied
portions Of that structure are kept just as warm
as the recitation rooms, are now supposed to be
in repentaut frame. inclined to economy not
mixed with an unusual reverence for "our
foreiathers' graves" and, it is deemed an auspi-
ciOus moment TO strike for the above-proposed
new project of vrtuous money. saving! Whether
or no the petition contemplates the elevation
into place of the old graye-stones buried near
the schoolhouse at the corner of Front and
Salem streets, is not known to your informant.
The locality, as every one is aware, is so re-
markably free from noise, as compared with
that melancholy site on Mechanic street, that
nothing in this respect is left to be desired. 1t
may cost something more 10 buy back, and to
complete the extensive repairs necessary to be
made, than it would to build in some other
graveyard, but what Of that? Economy is
economy, the world ever. The rear portion of
the Front street schoolhouse is believed TO be
extremely near to, if not actually upon what
once aodS hallowed ground; but, where the grave
stones, on that account, cannot be exactly re-
stored, they can, of course, be leaned up against
that peculiar part of the building alluded to-
so that all good citizens will be able to see and
reverence them.
And, now, if the School Board several of whom
are mere pack Of cole -e-bred dolis--show
any rcstiveness at such measure of riald
economy and simple reverence for the fore
Fathers and the more than four mothers whose
graves are TO be rescued from dissertation, let
this inhuman committee be pitched out of office,
at once, and let their places be filed by ''men of
culture, who, though never in a college, have
YET some semblance of reverence for crude fore
latheriSm" left in their-yea, in their obdurate
hearts there! Let the good work, thus begun,
be followed up. Down with the Thomas street
school house, and up with the old States,
with uncouh rhymes and shapecss sculpture deckd
still lying there concealed Away with all this
mammonsm! away with it! Away with this
ambitious railway scheming, initiated near
Washington square; since it not only contcm-
plates secularlZng buteven trampling, "beneath
the iron wheels of, &c."-(to get into poetry
again) all the lovely repose that forms today
the chief attractiveness of the "Pine Meadow
buryinc ground! Away with the very name,
east WorceSter," bad luck to the like OF i'll
Why should Mammon, with his "rattlin9 car, =
invade that "rugged spot"
"Where heaves the turf, &C., &c."
And where, "every day, at noon, taere comes
falling, floating down, as il from the upper skies
the soltened notes, &c." that almost seem to
speak these words
Look out for the inine while the bell is a-ringin' '