Samuel Chipman Shaffner

William Malcolm Bent’s Autograph Book

Mack’s teacher signed his book one winter’s day in 1887.

Samuel Chipman Shaffner was Principal and teacher of the advanced class at the Paradise Academy, and Mack was one of fifty-two young people in the Class of 1887! 

Mr. Shaffner taught in a building that stood close to the Post Road just in front of the present building. It was described by one of its pupils (Robie Leonard, a classmate of Mack’s) as a one-story building divided into Advanced and Primary departments, facing north and south, with a long corridor between the two departments for girls’ and boys’ cloakrooms. Heat came from two box stoves. No one was ever warm.

Artist sketch of the second school in Paradise

Mr. Shaffner began teaching in Paradise in 1877, moving here from Granville. He had a wife, Lavinia Jane, and a two-year old daughter when he came. His salary was $400 per year; most married teachers had to have a second source of income.

And it was not easy work. Between the Advanced and Primary Departments there would often be more than one hundred pupils for whom he was responsible. And the buildings were far from spacious.

We do know that the Academy added an extension as the population grew, and it seems that the building burned or was somehow gone c. 1870.

Class of 1887 at Paradise Academy

After Mr. Shaffner left Paradise, he and Lavinia moved back to her home area in Granville, where he continued to teach, but at some point became a travelling salesman of fertilizer.

Poor Lavinia had an unhappy end; she died of “neuritis and exhaustion” while living with her daughter and her daughter’s barrister husband in Halifax. And the next year Mr. Shaffner remarried, at age 65. It all sounds unhappy. But who knows the story? There were no pensions; perhaps he had to keep “on the road” to put bread on the table, and Lavinia’s daughter was best able to care for her.

Another mystery to solve if anyone can help: where did Mr. Shaffner and his family live in Paradise for twenty years? No home in his name is known. He did have relatives here. His sister, Ella, was married to Joseph Longley. They lived in the brand new Second Empire home south of the river, and even with their four children there might have been room; it was a huge house. But Ella died of T.B. in 1890. He also had a first cousin in Paradise: Carrie Shaffner Bishop (great-grandmother of the writer) married to Frederick William. No family memory of a Mr. Shaffner boarding with the Bishops is known to me, but perhaps to someone else? We just don’t know.

To young Mack Bent, Mr. Shaffner, in the careful cursive inking of the day, gave the best advice he knew: do good and be good and that will make you happy. We hope he was.

Written by Barbara Bishop