ENGLEWOOD, N.J.—Can you imagine these poor kids having to wear long-sleeved dresses and shirts, with stockings and pants, in the summertime heat?
Little ones are outdoors for a summer session at the Lincoln School in Englewood in this image captured before 1910. Based on the poses of their teachers, they might be working on a sewing lesson.
Lincoln School was completed in 1869 at the corner of Humphrey Street and Englewood Avenue. This was directly in response to an 1867 New Jersey law that required tuition-free public schools be made available to all children ages 5–18.
The school started out as a small brick structure and was added onto over the years. In 1878, an enlargement to Lincoln saw the addition of the School for Colored Children, a separate section for black students (in 1881, 65 out of the school’s 805 students were black). It’s unknown how long the School for Colored Children was in use; note that in the photo above, black children and white children work side-by-side.
After the Lincoln School was destroyed by a fire in 1917, a new school by the same name was built the following year, also at Englewood Avenue and Humphrey Street. Englewood kids attended that facility for decades before it was torn down in 2016 to make way for an apartment building.
