Hidden Treasures: Forgotten Paintings and School Artifacts Unearthed

Milan resident Fred “Chip” Couse remembers the call he got five years ago like it was yesterday. “My friend Kathy Spiers was excited; she asked me to guess what she had found shoved underneath the custodian’s sink at Seymour Smith.” Spiers — then a secretary at the Seymour Smith Intermediate Learning Center in Pine Plains — had discovered four rare oil paintings from the 1930s.

“I often had to bring files downstairs to the storage room as part of my job; I happened upon the pictures and recognized them,” Spiers said. “They were the old WPA paintings that had hung on the walls of the school’s first-floor hallway. I was horrified!”

The forgotten trove of rare paintings and other artifacts offers a unique glimpse into the area’s past, from one-room schoolhouses to Depression-era art, but their fragile state underscores a pressing problem: Without proper preservation, these pieces of history are at risk of being lost.

Spiers, Stanford town historian since 2019, contacted Couse, a self-made expert in Pine Plains school history. “I went over right away to take a look,” he said. “We had no idea how those invaluable pictures got there. They weren’t too dirty but were clearly on the path to ruin.” The two friends decided to rescue them.

“There was a lot of amazing stuff we uncovered that needed rescuing, too,” Couse said. “That storage room was an old fall-out shelter, and the dust was at least 4 inches thick.”

The artwork had been commissioned by the federal government under the Work Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era program created to keep Americans working, including artists. Spiers identified the painter from his signature scrawled across the corner of one work: Iowa-born Walter C. Hartson (1866–1946), who studied in New York City and settled in Wassaic, N.Y. Some of his impressionist oil paintings of old stone houses in Dutchess and Columbia counties are on permanent display in the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, in Springfield, Mass.

Spiers and Couse unearthed centuries-old items. “We found one-room schoolhouse board minutes dating from 1815 — those are our oldest documents,” Couse said. There are attendance books from the Seymour Smith Academy years (1879–1894), trophies from the Pine Plains Union Free School days (1894–1931) and yearbooks from Pine Plains Central School District (1931 to present). “The books produced before 1940 were handmade with craft paper,” he said.”They are delicate and falling apart.” According to Couse, the most unusual find was a pair of wooden corporal punishment paddles. “They were finally outlawed in New York state in the 1960s,” he said.

Couse formed a committee to tackle the task of preserving the artifacts, and recruited school board member Jim Griffin and Milan historian Victoria Lo Brutto. “The first step was to get everything out of the basement,” he said. With the approval of PPCSD and the help of custodian Tim Slater, the history buffs moved their precious discoveries to a first-floor room in Seymour Smith. Couse, a 25-year school board veteran, asked the district for a budget of $5,000. “We got the money,” he said. “So far we’ve only spent $500 on weather-proof storage cartons.”

Spiers, trained in the cataloging process, sought expert advice from Greater Hudson Heritage Network, then organized an archiving system. “We used a classroom at Seymour Smith and spread boxes [of artifacts] across student desks to assess and sort what we had,” she said. “You should have seen us!”

The Seymour Smith basement treasures spurred a broader effort to preserve Pine Plains school history. Couse created four fat notebooks filled with copies of old newspaper articles, athletic team photographs, programs yellowed with age and other mementos. His Facebook page “PPCS Archives” displays photos of school artifacts and has more than 600 followers. Couse has mapped and photographed the district’s 16 remaining one-room schoolhouses, most of which have been converted to private homes. One restored structure in Stanfordville is a museum — the Attlebury Schoolhouse — which opens annually for the PPCSD first-graders’ field trip. Four schoolhouses are lost to history, “Although I recently unearthed and documented one of the old foundations near Shekomeko,” Couse said.

Now the archive committee is running out of gas, Couse told the Herald. “We’d just begun the cataloging process when COVID interrupted us, and only 25% of our work is done,” he lamented.  “We had hopes of digitizing everything, but it’s just too expensive.” The New York State Archives awards grants for record management, “but to be honest, going after that money is daunting,” Couse said. “We would be standing at the end of a very long line.” 

This week Couse, recently named the first-ever PPCSD historian, updated the Board of Education on the status of the archival collection. “We need to find the best custodian for these artifacts,” he said. “Obviously, the school has not been the best choice for this.”

Couse proposed that the high school retain archives dating from the union free era; the one-room schoolhouse archives would be dispersed to the appropriate town historian — except for Pine Plains. “Town historian Dyan Wapnick told me there is no available storage, so the high school will also have to keep those items for now,” he said. “We also need to hire an archivist. It’s up to the school board to find a path to maintain this [historic collection]. There must be a plan beyond us.”

Superintendent Brian Timm has designated a room in the school to house the artifacts, soon to be moved out of Seymour Smith. The four Hartson paintings, estimated by Couse to be worth nearly $10,000 each, are insured and displayed in the PPCSD office and Stissing Mountain Junior/Senior High School library.

Tours of the Attlebury Schoolhouse can be arranged through the Stanford Historical Society.