Excerpt from Records of the First Class of the First State Normal School in America: Established at Lexington, Massachusetts, 1839 Sketches of the beginning and early history of the first State Normal School in this country, established at Lexington, Mass., July, 1839, having been published in connection with the quarter-centennial and semi-centennial memorials of the school, we confine ourselves in this volume to the story of its "First Class," as told in the records kept by the members from year to year for their annual meetings. It was the custom adopted at the first to appoint one of the number to prepare an address for the following meeting, the topic being left to her own choice. She became the guardian of the Record Book, and was expected to copy her address into it. Thus the manuscript became a book of many authors. After the lapse of more than half a century, in which it has doubled its original number of pages, its value as a record of historical and educational events has been increasingly appreciated. The few surviving members of the Class whose story it tells noticed with much regret that some of its most valuable pages were becoming illegible from the fading of the ink. Anxiety lest the entire record he lost was relieved by an offer from one of their number to defray the expense of printing an edition for private distribution among the original members and their descendants. To this generosity the appearance of the book in its present form is due, and the enjoyment of its permanent possession is thereby made possible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.