District Five Schoolhouse
building in Massachusetts, United States
The District Five Schoolhouse, also known as the Fenner Hill School, is a historic former school building at 449 School Street in Webster, Massachusetts. Built in 1835, the one-room schoolhouse was the first school building built by the recently incorporated town of Webster. It served the town as a school for 100 years, after which it was used by the school system for storage. In 1966 it became the museum and headquarters of the Webster-Dudley Historical Society. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
Description and history
The District Five Schoolhouse is located south of Webster's central business district, on the east side of School Street, historically the major route leading south toward Thompson, Connecticut. It is a single-story brick building, rectangular in shape, with a gable roof oriented parallel to the street. A gable-roofed wood frame vestibule on the south side houses the main entrance, and a shed-roof ell extends to the north. The east and west sides each have three sash windows. The interior houses a single classroom, with the northern ell originally housing wood storage and a bathroom, now altered to house a kitchen and bath.
“District Five Schoolhouse” enters the record as building in Massachusetts, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what District, Five and Schoolhouse can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“District Five Schoolhouse” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, District, Five and Schoolhouse provides the most credible route into that argument.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5283321. Authority coordinates are 42.043, -71.883. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1835, 1966 and 1991.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “District Five Schoolhouse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.