Walking for Lady Liberty
By Jonathan Monfiletto
While writing my recent blog article on two of Yates County’s rural schoolhouses – Barrington District No. 10 and Jerusalem District No. 1 – I searched through our box of rural school photographs to see if I could find photos of either of these two schoolhouses other than the photos in Jennie L. Hiler’s book “Memories of the Rural Schools of Yates County, New York.” Amid my search, I came across this photo depicting students and teachers from Branchport Elementary School walking together and holding signs reading “Walk for Liberty” and listing their respective teacher and grade.
Judging from the coloring and fading of the photo, it came from a newspaper collection, as I have seen other photos similar in appearance in our collection of photos from The Chronicle-Express. I thought perhaps the photo and the walk it depicts had something to do with the civil rights movement, but the date on the back of the photo is from 1985 so I knew that couldn’t be it. Then I thought perhaps the event had something to do with apartheid in South Africa, as the anti-apartheid movement seems to have been heating up around then.
So, naturally, I turned to our digitized newspaper collection to see what I could find out, especially since the photo from Branchport Elementary School seems to have been a newspaper photo. And, I found out the walk did not have anything to do with apartheid or any other noble human rights cause; instead, it was related to a noble patriotic cause, as the students and their teachers walked to raise money toward the restoration of the Statue of Liberty.
While the photo I came across features Branchport Elementary School, I came across an article from the June 6, 1985 edition of The Chronicle-Express that highlights students and teachers from Penn Yan schools – Penn Yan Elementary, St. Michael’s, and Emmanuel Baptist Academy. On the morning of Wednesday, May 29, 1985, more than 1,000 children from these schools – as well as teachers and faculty – left their schools to parade through the streets of Penn Yan on the Walk for Liberty. The group headed down Liberty Street and back up Main Street in what the newspaper described as “a flag-waving parade that ended at the Yates County Courthouse lawn,” where local school and public officials hosted a brief ceremony.
The marchers carried flags and signs and drew bystanders to join them on their walk to the courthouse, where they stood for the national anthem and the raising of the American flag and listened to several brief presentations. The presentations included a reading by Amy Tournour of “The New Colossus,” the poem written by Emma Lazarus as a tribute to the Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty was being restored for its 100th anniversary the following year, so the schoolchildren learned about the statue and its symbolism of democracy to prepare them for their walk. Then, the children raised $2,000 in pledges by their families toward the national Lady Liberty Campaign to fund the renovation project. The children returned to their school day following the ceremony at the courthouse, the newspaper notes.
An item that appeared in the June 13, 1985 edition of The Chronicle-Express indicates the students and teachers of Branchport Elementary School marched separately from their cohorts in Penn Yan because conflicts prevented the students and teachers from Branchport from traveling to Penn Yan. It is unclear whether that means they walked on a different day or at the same time but in a different location. The Branchport students, teachers, and administrators left school and marched with various musical instruments to the Branchport Library and back to the school; a flag raising ceremony took place on the school lawn when they returned. This included Becky Burton reciting a composition she wrote for the occasion.
The Branchport Walk for Liberty was apparently one of the last hurrahs for Branchport Elementary School, as the school seems to have closed at the end of that school year. “The last days of the Branchport Elementary School are busy ones with special programs being presented by classes and PTA groups,” the newspaper item states. “As soon as the school days are over for the children, workers will begin to clean and close the school. Children will be entering the Penn Yan school classrooms in the fall.”
