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The Story
Built in 1899-1900 and designed in the Romanesque Revival style by the prominent area firm of Gardner, Pyne and Gardner, the State Normal Training School is a red-brick, two-and-a-half-story late Victorian institutional building on Washington Street in Westfield, trimmed with cut brownstone and topped by a double hip roof. It served as the home of the second-oldest public teacher-training school in the nation, functioning as a practice-teaching facility for the adjacent Westfield State Normal School as well as a regular community school. The building chronicles the late-19th-century movement to professionalize teaching, from which present-day state colleges grew, and is significant under National Register criteria A, B, and C.
About this site
State Normal Training School is a landmark in Westfield, Hampden County. It is one of 3,654 landmarks documented in Hampden County, among 3,815 historic sites cataloged across the county on MassRoam.
The site sits at 42.1221, -72.7516 near Westfield. The nearest cataloged historic site is House at 50 Church St (landmark), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Multi-Family House at 61-63 School St, Multi-Family House at 55-57 Church St, and Multi-Family House at 53 Church St.
This record is drawn from public historical records. Use the map below for its exact position and turn-by-turn directions.
Westfield's normal school, founded in 1839 as the second in Massachusetts and among the oldest teacher-training institutions in the country, needed a real elementary school where its students could practice. This H-shaped brick building with brownstone trim, designed by the Springfield firm Gardner, Pyne & Gardner, opened for that purpose in 1900 and was run jointly by the state and the city until 1956, after which it became an ordinary elementary school. Westfield took formal title in 1977 and used it as the city courthouse until 2012. Listed on the National Register in 1983, it was then converted into apartments and is known locally as Courthouse Square.
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