Melina Amanda Bosworth was born in 1848 in New York. She graduated from the Ripley Female College in Vermont. From 1887 to 1909, she was an instructor of history and literature at the Model School and attended several meetings of the Thencanic Society. She died in 1927 in Vermont.
Mabel Evelyn Bray was born in Madison, New Jersey on January 3, 1878, to Edward A. Bray, a Presbyterian clergyperson who emigrated from England in the 1870s and Priscilla Sarah Haire, a concert pianist from Michigan. By 1880, the family left New Jersey and were living in Michigan where Bray spent her youth along with her younger siblings, John R. and Eugenia (later Persons).
Bray’s educational background was diverse. She graduated from the Michigan Female Seminary in 1897; studied music in Germany and Italy; and completed courses at the University of Michigan, Detroit Conservatory of Music, and programs through the New School of Methods of Public School Music in various locations.
After traveling in Europe and singing in “small-town opera houses,” she began teaching music at public schools in Moorhead, Minnesota in 1899. Later, she taught at a few other schools in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1903, she was head of the Music Department at the State Normal School in Cheney, Washington. Six years later, she returned to New Jersey to teach at the Westfield Public Schools. There, she founded The Supervisors School of Music. In Westfield, she began living with fellow teacher Harriet E. Mann, until Mann’s death in 1944.
According to the September 25, 1979 issue of The Signal, Bray arrived at The New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton in 1918 “to organize and administer a new special music curriculum.” She served as head of the Music Department from 1918 until her retirement in 1948 and earned the rank of full professor in 1935. She improved music instruction throughout the state by organizing high school choral groups. Her music program at what is now The College of New Jersey extended through the 1970s. She authored several music textbooks, including the Music Hour series for teachers and students.
In 1959, she moved to the Royal Oaks Manor retirement home in Duarte, California. There, she taught music appreciation classes to the other residents for fourteen years. She also edited the house newsletter Oak Leaves.
Trenton State College honored her in 1963 by naming the newly built music building “Bray Hall.” It was demolished in 1999 to make way for the new Social Sciences Building.
Mabel Bray died on May 27, 1979, at the age of 101, in Duarte.
Alice Langdon Brewster was born January 25, 1868 to Charles Gilman Brewster (1832-1880), a taxidermist and proprietor of a natural history store in Boston, and Mary Ann Hill (1840-1924), in Roxbury, Massachusetts. After Charles’ death in the shipwreck of the steamboat S.S. Narragansett in 1880, the family joined his sister’s family in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Alice attended high school in Portsmouth and later graduated from Wellesley College in 1889. After teaching at Westbury High School in Massachusetts for two years, she moved to Trenton to teach literature and history at the Model School of the New Jersey State Normal School where she served from 1891 to 1917. She was well-liked by her students and maintained decades long friendships with several of them. After the Model School closed in 1917, Brewster taught English at the New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton until her retirement in 1933. Shortly after, the Brewster House dormitory was opened on the new Hillwood Lakes campus. It was the first campus building named for a living person.
After her retirement, Brewster returned to her family home in Portsmouth, where she lived with her sister Edith Gilman Brewster (1873-1960), brother Charles Warren Brewster (1871-1950), sister-in-law (Charles’ wife) Martha “Daisy” Tredick Brewster (1879-1958), and “Black Velvet” the cat. The Brewster family also had a cottage in the White Mountains in North Woodstock, New Hampshire where they would spend a few weeks in the summers.
Alice Brewster was an active writer and self-published several small poetry books. She operated an antiques shop in the home and traveled around New England as a dealer and buyer at antiques fairs and shows. After her sister Edith Brewster died in 1960, she moved to the home of her nephew Charles T. Brewster in Meredith, New Hampshire. She died February 14, 1962 in New Hampshire.
Clayton Roy Brower was born in 1922 in Kingston, New York. He earned a Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Syracuse University, served in the army, and later earned a Doctorate from Columbia University. He began teaching in 1948 in Pulaski, New York, was the assistant superintendent of Plainfield Public Schools in 1955, then became professor and Chair of the Education Department at Trenton State College in 1962. In 1970, he became Interim chief executive, then president from 1971 to 1979. He died at the age of 99 on June 30, 2022.
Model School Latin and English instructor. FamilySearch ID: LJLG-8GW
Superintendent of Schools in New Jersey and Member of the Faculty Committee on Assembly Programs at Trenton. Later president at Glassboro from 1937-1952.
Manual training/industrial arts instructor, 1894-1935. Also involved with Thencanic Society. FamilySearch ID: M2SY-9DN
Normal and/or Model School instructor (1895-1900) and possible graduate. Later a Principal at Ursinus College. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/57157109/charles-ernest-dechant
Vernetta F. Decker was a faculty member at The College of New Jersey when it was called The New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton, New Jersey State Teachers College and State Normal School at Trenton, and New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton from 1926-1957. She taught Speech and was the Dean of Women. Decker Hall, a residence hall on the current Ewing campus, is named in her honor.
Longtime educator and eventually supervisor of the Girls' Department of the State Model School. Namesake of Ely Hall. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/126416986/sarah-yardley-ely
