When Mount completed this highly symbolic painting of a schoolyard scrap, an 11-year-old Walt Whitman was just finishing his own schooling in Brooklyn, at District School No. 1 on Concord and Adams Streets. After tight family finances forced the young Whitman to work, he left his one-room school behind, but that was far from the end of his classroom experiences. From 1836 until 1841, Walt Whitman taught at eight different “district” schools across Long Island, from as far west as Whitestone and Jamaica Academy to as far east as Southold.
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