Walt Whitman taught at several country schools on Long Island in the 1830s and early 1840s.

Woodbury, where the school pictured above was located, is a hamlet located within the town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, on Long Island. It is not far from West Hills, where Whitman was born.

Posed here are two articles about Whitman schoolteacher:

Horace L. Ttraubel, ‘Walt Whitman Schoolmaster’

Horace L. Traubel, “Walt Schoolmaster: Notes of a Conversation with Charles A. Roe, 1894”

Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers; an address delivered in Philadelphia in April 1895

Charles Roe was one of Whitman’s pupils at a school in what is now Queens (it was then part of Long Island).

 

Natalie A. Naylor, ‘Walter Whitman at School’ (2)

Natalie A. Naylor, “Walter Whitman at School: Education and Teaching in the Nineteenth Century”

New York History, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 6-27

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   May 2023