This two-story wooden building, 64 feet by 42 feet, accommodating 84 students, was to be the institution's educational plant for almost half a century.[1] There were small and large classrooms, with blackboards in each. Since changes were made to the school, the board of education required people to attend three terms for fourteen consecutive weeks, establishing a year's course.[4] The building was dedicated on August 19, 1846, with Horace Mann saying on the occasion: "Among all the lights and shadows that ever crossed my path, this day’s radiance is the brightest...I consider this event as marking an era in the progress of education—which as we all know is the progress of civilization-on this western continent, and throughout the world. It is the completion of the first normal schoolhouse ever erected in Massachusetts,—in the Union,—in this hemisphere.