In Woodstown and Pilesgrove, public education developed from scattered early schoolhouses into a larger centralized system. The earliest schoolhouse in Woodstown was built about 1750 near Elm Street and School Lane, later moved to South Main Street, and was replaced in 1852 by a combined municipal building and school whose first floor held municipal offices and second floor held classrooms; after enlargement, it became the sole property of the school district in 1869, remained the community’s only public school for many years, and educated the first high school class, which graduated in 1885. Bacon Academy, funded by local Quaker David Bacon, opened in 1841-42 as a private school and from 1905 until 1916 was rented by the Woodstown-Pilesgrove School District for use as the community’s high school. A proposal to buy the Bacon Academy property and additional land on North Main Street was defeated in 1912, but voters overwhelmingly approved a later proposal in September 1914 to buy seven acres from Edward Riley for a new school. Albert W. Dilks was selected as architect, the cornerstone was laid on May 31, 1915, and the new Woodstown Public School opened in September 1916, accommodating all twelve grades; the class of 1917 was the first high school class to graduate there. Its site east of the railroad tracks was controversial because some residents thought it lay too far out of town, though only a few structures stood there at the time, including the Hughes Building, St. Joseph’s R.C. Church and Rectory on Broad Street, and a few houses. In Pilesgrove Township, as early as the 1840s, eight rural one-room schoolhouses served children in grades one through eight, with travel limited to horse, horse-drawn vehicle, or foot; Laurel Hill closed in 1910 and its pupils were sent to the Woodstown Public School on South Main Street, while Eldridges Hill School was moved to the Pilesgrove-Woodstown Historical Society property in 1992, restored, furnished with period equipment, and opened to the public. Woodstown also had an elementary school on Bailey Street, built in the early 1900s and standing until the late 1950s. The Woodstown Public School complex later expanded with wing additions and a gymnasium in 1936-37, opened to students in January 1938, then shared its building with only the middle school after the Mary Shoemaker School opened in 1956; later additions included a separate middle school building in 1956 and a new gymnasium in 1983, followed by extensive renovations beginning in 2013. On May 12, 1922, during a car trip from Penns Grove to Atlantic City, U.S. President Warren G. Harding stopped briefly in Woodstown and addressed a local crowd at the Woodstown Public School, attended by Governor Walter E. Edge, Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, and local businessmen Edward B. Humphreys and Archibald Jones, while nearby Route 40, named the Harding Highway in his honor, had been paved just beyond the east side of the school driveway.