“At a meeting of the inhabitants, July 21, 1717, they agreed that Clerk Lawrence’s wife and Ephraim Winship’s wife keep school from ye day of ye date hereof until ye last day of October next following; and if they have not scholars sufficient as to numbers to amount to five shillings a week, at three pence a scholar a week, then ye towne to make up what is wanted of ye five shillings out of the treasury thereof; provided ye selectmen do not see cause to demolish sd schole before sd term be expired.” Probably no deductions from the above specified wages were necessary for living expenses, which these mistresses of households may be supposed to have earned in their duties at home. When, in the course of the succeeding century, wages increased to seventy-five cents or even to a dollar a week, the teacher was expected to “board around,” though sometimes her board in one place was paid for from public funds. In the latter case, in many New England towns, the privilege of boarding the teacher, like that of boarding town paupers, was put up for public competition, and was struck off to the lowest bidder. Up to 1828 girls did not go to the public schools in Rhode Island. Antedating the earliest records here transcribed is the claim made that the first free school in America was made in Virginia in 1621. If so it struck no root, for, in 1671, Bishop Berkely, Governor of Virginia, wrote, “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years.” It was one hundred and seven years later, in 1778, that Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature, designed to establish a system of public schools in that State, arguing that “the greatest sacrifice the people of the republic can make will fail to secure civil liberty to their posterity unless they provide for the education of youth.” In the Dutch settlement of Manhattan a movement for schools was made which proved more successful than in Virginia, as befitted its source in the Netherlands, where, since the sixteenth century, “the fruitfulness of a wise and state-administered system of universal education” had been illustrated. In 1630, the States-General of Holland issued orders to the Dutch East India Company in Manhattan to maintain a clergyman and a schoolmaster, and in 1633 arrived Adam Roelandsen, and the first school-tax ever levied in America was imposed on each householder and inhabitant. So Brooklyn had the first free public school in the United States. Until 1808, this school was in charge of the local congregation of the Dutch Reformed church; then a board of trustees was appointed. This school still continues. In 1658, the Burgomasters petitioned for a fit person as Latin schoolmaster. This was granted, and so the first classical school was instituted.