Warren First Congregational Church-Federated Church

The Woods Hole School is located near the center of thé village of Woods Hole. It stands on approximately ½ acre site which fronts on School Street to the east and extends northwest to Eel Pond. In the general vicinity of the School are several late 19th century frame houses, a Bell Tower Sanctuary, and an array of scientific buildings belonging to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the Marine Biological Laboratory. The present schoolhouse is 2½ stories high (with a full basement at the rear) and is cruciform in plan with gabled wings. Vernacular Stick/Queen Anne styling is manifested in a frame structure sheathed in clapboard and decorated with wooden shingling and stickwork.

Shed roofed porches ornament the interior corners at the front (east side) of the building, while a two-stage cupola (complete with brass bell) surmounts the intersection of the roof gables. The north and south entrance porches are composed of turned posts, a geometric balustrade, and a lattice field supported by brackets. The cupola features a shingled base, hip roofs (bracketed at the first level), and louvered enclosures..: Horizontal bands encircle the regular, 6 over 6 fenestration of the schoolhouse. Een- estration is further articulated by plain wooden corner boards and friezes, and ver- tical stickwork on the second story of the north/south wings. Each gable field contains a long tripartite window, decorated with a fancifully sawnskirt on the south, west, and north gables.

As originally constructed in 1870, the Woods Hole School was a two room, 2½ story wooden structure with a front gable, small cupola, and.center entrance. The vernacular Ital- ianate influence of this design was revealed in the open arcades of the cupola and the simole wooden cornices over the facade windows, which remain on the present structure.

/Architect S.D.Kelley, architect; Statement of Significance (in one paragraph) Mead, Mason & Co., builder (1885) The Woods Hole School retains integrity of design, materials, workmanship, setting, and location. The schoolhouse is significant for its role in the education of the community and for its role in summer science activities. It is also a fine example of Victorian institutional architecture in the town and one of its few extant examples; it meets criteria A and C of the National Register. Up to the middle of the 19th century, the village of Woods Hole consisted of less than 40 houses, no church, and a small school which doubled as a meeting hall.

In recogni- tion of slowly increasing development, in 1851 Joseph Fay, a prominent citizen of Woods Hole, gave the Town of Falmouth "a lot of land for the erection of a School house and for such other public purposes as may seem proper and desirable for the use of the in- habitants of Woods Hole." By the time of the 1858 Walling map, the site was labelled "school" on an inset of the village. Three houses were located on this piece of Fay property at the time. One built about 1846, was used as a school for an undocumented period of time before it was sold and moved in 1885; the other two buildings were also moved by 1885. Town meeting voted in 1870 to authorize a conmittee either to sell the existing school- house, to add to it, or to build a new 'structure.

Apparently a new schoolhouse was agreed upon, for an 1874 indenture between Mr. Fay and the Falmouth Selectmen was nec- essary to enlarge the lot on which a new schoolhouse is stated to have been built.