Lewis Henry Morgan School 37

Courtesy of Michael Oberg.

The No. 16 annex school, established in 1913, was subsequently renamed after Lewis Henry Morgan, perhaps to honor the centennial of his birth in 1918.  On January 29, 1917, a new primary school building located at 353 Congress Avenue in Rochester’s 19th ward opened. At the time, there were 331 pupils enrolled, and after a few years of expansion, the complex included 20 classrooms. Morgan’s legacy was not only reflected in the school’s name but also in the design of the school’s assembly hall, where hand-carved beavers on tree trunks bordered the stage. The proscenium arch was emblazoned with the names of the nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy.  These designs represented the research that Morgan did on the American beaver and Haudenosaunee political organization in the mid-nineteenth century.

By the 1930s, the school had increased its enrollment to almost 1000 students. The school was known for its innovative curriculum, for instance, it was reported that in 1990 a fifth-grade class took part in NASA’s Spaced Exposed Experiment Developed for Students (SEEDS) project and conducted experiments on the effects of extreme temperature, cosmic radiation, and weightlessness on the growth of tomatoes. Faced with declining enrollment since the late 1990s, however, the Rochester City School District eventually closed the school in 2005. The building is currently occupied by Dr. Walter Cooper Academy.