First+Kindergartens+in+America+B

By: Courtnei Robbins

House where the first kindergarten began

__**The Origins of the First Kindergarten**__
 * The very fist kindergarten in America was founded 157 years ago in 1856.
 * The kindergarten was founded by Margarethe Meyer Schurz.
 * Mrs. Schurz was a native of Hamburg, Germany, and as a young woman learned the principles of the kindergarten from its creator, Friedrich Froebel.
 * (Froebel believed that most mothers were not qualified to perform the crucial educational functions for small children, and therefore designed a new type of institution for early-childhood education, which he called the Kindergarten, in Blankenburg, Thuringia in 1840)
 * In the 1850s she came to London, where her sister had founded the first kindergarten there.
 * They came to America shortly after her husband was released from prison, and settled at first on the east coast and then in 1855 they came to Watertown where her husband had relatives.
 * Once settled in, Margarethe longed for something that would give purpose to her life, so she began a small kindergarten class in the Shurtz family home.
 * The class proved to be very successful, but the noise of the children was too much for her husband, so she was forced to move her class to a small frame building that was being used as a private home by Carl Schurz’s parents.
 * It was in this little building that the kindergarten took off.
 * The original class numbered only about five students.
 * The Schurz children Agathe and Marianne, two Juessen girls (cousins of the Schurz’s) and the lone boy Franklin Blumenfeld.
 * Mrs. Schurz ran her school through 1857 when the Schurz family moved to Milwaukee. The kindergarten continued sporadically here, always operated as a private school, through the nineteenth century, finally becoming a part of the public school curriculum after the turn of the last century.

__**1858**__
 * After the family’s departure, others took over the kindergarten in Watertown:
 * Carl’s cousin, Miss Juessen
 * Mrs. Rose Kunert
 * Mrs. Kunert’s sister
 * Tante Elle Koenig who ran it as a private kindergarten for 42 years.

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 * __Citations__**

__**Kindergarten Building**__
 * As for the kindergarten building, after the Schurz family left Watertown, the building passed through many hands, becoming:
 * a cigar factory
 * fish store
 * religious book store
 * In the 1920s a local women’s club, the Saturday Club, erected a memorial marker to designate the historical significance of the building.
 * Then in 1956, exactly 100 years after the founding of the kindergarten, the little building was in danger of being razed.
 * It was through the efforts of Mrs. Rudy Herman and Gladys Mollart of the Watertown Historical Society that the structure was saved and moved to the grounds of the Octagon House, where it now rests. It has been open to the public since 1957.