Bullard History

by Martha DeWolf

Several years after graduating from Holliston, Fanny J. Bullard taught at a private school in New Haven. After that she went to Quincy, Mass. to study under Col. Parker[1] for 3 months and then to the Hampton Institute the day after Christmas to educate freed slaves and captured Indians. On May 31,1879 Lewis and Ada had their first child. Anna Howard was back in Boston.

In July, John Anson Bullard wrote to his wife Fanny (who was probably in Nantucket). He had lost two of his hired men and so reports to Fanny that “...I have received your letter but did not answer it for want of time. The haying is finished for the present, the old Earn is well filled up and the new one about half full. The clapboarding is not yet done, but the other carpenters work is nearly finished. We have thought some of making a roof cover over the plank walk on the east side of ell to the new barn. What do you think of that plan? .... My health has been very good since you left here and am getting along as well as I can.......... There are several papers here requiring your signature which I shall bring with me and I also want to have the whole matter decide as to what is to he done in all places where our relatives are now buried as I expect to have some time this fall to attend to whatever you may want to have done before I am again so situated that I cannot do it for want of time....”

Mary Daly continued to come to the Farm to do sewing for Bethia, even after she became crippled with rhuematism. The children remembered laying boards on the ground for her to walk on as she couldn’t walk on the uneven surface of the yard or for that matter the mud, snow or ice.

Boston
Oct. 9^th, 1879

My dear Aunt Fanny,
It is at last decided that we are to leave Boston Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning........... The baby is covered from head to foot with chickenpox, and I have had a bad attack of Cholera morbus so the last week has not been passed very pleasantly...”
Anna

[1] Francis Wayland Parker (October 9, 1837 – March 2, 1902) was a pioneer of the progressive school movement in the United States. He believed that education should include the complete development of an individual ? mental, physical, and moral. John Dewey called him the "father of progressive education."

Parker was born in Bedford, New Hampshire in Hillsborough County. He was educated in the public schools and began his career as a village teacher in New Hampshire at age 16.

In August 1861, at the beginning of the American Civil War, Parker enlisted as a private in the 4th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. He was elected lieutenant and was later promoted to captain and commander of the company. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the 4th New Hampshire in January 1865. He was captured and held prisoner in North Carolina in May, 1865.

After the war ended, Colonel Parker resumed teaching, first in Ohio where he became the head of the normal school in Dayton, Ohio. In 1872 he traveled to Germany to study at the University of Berlin. In Europe, Parker examined the new methods of pedagogy being developed there, proposed by European theorists such as Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and particularly Johann Friedrich Herbart.

In 1875, Parker was able to put h

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