People who happen by the Hamilton Township School District elementary school on Harcourt Drive would rightly conclude they are in front of Kisthardt School. But walk through the front door, look to the left, and on the wall hangs a brass plaque designating the name of the school as DeCou.
How did the Hamilton school district’s smallest elementary school come to have two names? First, land wealth, and second, dedication to the community.
The land around Kisthardt School was once owned by two prominent Hamilton families: the Abbotts and the DeCous. The two families apparently sold land back and forth to one another. For example, the house that sits at 58 Soloff Drive is known as the Abbott-DeCou House because the Abbott family owned it, then sold it to the DeCou family. Eventually, the DeCou family sold it back to the Abbotts.
The DeCou family also sold farmland in the area for new houses.
New homes meant children would need a school. In 1912, for a sum of $1,000, Peter Ellis DeCou sold property on South Broad Street to the Board of Education, where the district built a four-room schoolhouse.
When DeCou School opened in the fall of 1912, it was already overcrowded. That’s because the eight-room Rowan School, now the Rusling Hose Company, had become overcrowded, so students were shifted to DeCou. Parents were not happy because the Rowan students were being shuttled to DeCou via trolley at a cost to the township of $2,500 for the school year. The district promised to address the issue, but it took nearly 40 years.
By 1918, the world was weathering an influenza pandemic. Back then, like today, preventing disease became an urgent concern. So, in 1919, the Board of Education hired the district’s first school nurse.
Enter 32-year-old Leona Kisthardt.
Leona came to the district after working as a head nurse at Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point, Maryland. She had received her nursing degree in 1914 from the Lankenau School of Nursing in Philadelphia.
It’s unclear why Leona came north. Her mother was in the area, as was her sister, Marguerite, who taught in the Trenton school district, and a brother, Harry. Leona ended up living with her sister and mother at 322 Ardmore Ave. in Trenton.
Leona went right to work as the district’s nurse, organizing vaccine clinics for incoming students. She spoke often at parent meetings and community gatherings. In 1944, she was in charge of monitoring students for signs of polio. In 1946, Kisthardt helped establish a dental clinic in the basement of Greenwood School. Eventually, the district needed more nurses for its growing enrollment, and in 1939, Kisthardt became the head nurse for the district, supervising other school nurses.
As the district grew, the parents whose children were still attending school at DeCou were growing more restless. They had been promised a new school in 1932 that never came to fruition. In 1949, the Board of Education opted to erect a junior high school and not a new elementary school. Finally, in 1951, the district broke ground on a new DeCou School on what is now Harcourt Drive.
Leona Kisthardt was still busy working in the district when the new DeCou School was under construction. But by March 1954, Kisthardt informed the Board of Education that she would retire at the end of the school year, ending a 35-year career in the district. The board accepted her resignation, noting it would present her at the June 1954 graduation with “a scroll citing her long and faithful service to the township.”
Unfortunately, a little over a month later, on Monday, April 26, 1954, The Trenton Times ran Kisthardt’s obituary under the headlines: “Long Illness Fatal: School Nurse to be Buried on Wednesday.”
When Wednesday came, the funeral services were held at Saul’s Funeral Home, which was then located at 1740 Greenwood Ave. And on that Wednesday, the Hamilton Township School District showed the community just how much it loved and admired nurse Leona Kisthardt.
At its December 1954 school board meeting, the Hamilton Township Board of Education announced that it would rename DeCou School after Leona Kisthardt.
The resolution for the renaming read, in part:
“Miss Kisthardt was loved by everyone, including every pupil who attended Hamilton Township Schools during the time she served as school nurse. She was a credit to her nursing profession. She was well known for her kindness and generosity to hundreds of needy families, often-times using funds of her own to aid those in distress.
“Anyone who had the privilege of knowing Ms. Kisthardt will agree that some gesture should be made to honor her memory and her faithful service.”
Leona Kisthardt is buried with her mother in Greenwood Cemetery.
