The Morewood School is a historic one-room schoolhouse at 30 South Mountain Road in Pittsfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Built in 1843, it was converted to a vacation cottage in the 1980s after serving for 130 years as a schoolhouse. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. Originally located on around 1825, the lot has been reduced to.HistoryNamed after the Morewood family who owned "Broad Hall", the current Pittsfield Country Club, the schoolhouse was built around 1843. According to a record book retained by the Berkshire County Historical Society kept by Jesse Oliver Howard, who attended the school in 1865, the original school house burned in June 1841 when several class mates started a fire in the playground during the noon time recess. When Jesse Howard attended the school, the pupils ranged in age from 4–16 years old sitting in benches with no backs. Until 1925, water was drawn from the Howard brook in the wood next to the school. Morewood educated the children of the local early families such as the Howards, Luces and Melvilles. Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick and three other novels while living with his family in the nearby Arrowhead farm from 1850-1863.Horace Mann accepted the position of First Secretary of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts in 1837 when Edward Everett was governor. He took office at a time when glaring weaknesses existed in public education in Massachusetts. He went to Pittsfield in the Berkshire Hills, in western Massachusetts to hold a "teachers’ institute," or convention. He reached the town, in the morning, only to find that no arrangements had been made, and that the little red schoolhouse in which the institute was to be held was in no presentable condition.
