Halloween Parade

Students at the old Canaan Center School on Granite Avenue in North Canaan enjoy a Halloween parade around the playground behind the school in the early 1950s. The two-story wood-frame school was built in 1877 and enlarged several times over the 79 years it served the town before the modern masonry structure, still in use today, was opened in 1956. It, too, has been repeatedly enlarged.

The old school had no playground equipment and students played impromptu games that ranged from tag to dodge ball to hopscotch, scratching the grid in the gravel with sticks and using pebbles as markers. A gnarly pine tree on the hill behind the school served as a jungle gym. Every Halloween a costume parade circled the large area of the yard.

In the days before recycling, a barrel behind the first-grade annex was used to burn the tons of wastepaper the school generated.