UFA to celebrate 200 years of memories, milestones

Dennis Thompson only attended Utica Free Academy for a little less than three years, having lived in Mohawk all his life, but he said some of his strongest school-aged memories come from that school.

“I really enjoyed the teachers – the students respected them – and you got a really good quality education,” said Thompson, who graduated in 1962 and currently is president of the academy’s Alumni Association.

Though the school has been closed for nearly 30 years, passion for the academy still runs deep for those who attended. Some members of the Alumni Association still remember the school’s alma mater, singing strands of “UFA, Oh, UFA” while sifting through old school yearbooks and documents on the first floor of the Oneida County Historical Society in Utica.

The bicentennial will be celebrated Sept. 20, 2014, in an alumni banquet at Twin Ponds Golf Course in New York Mills.

Recorded history of the academy started in 1813 when the burgeoning population of residents in a city that had not yet been chartered realized they would need a proper school, according to Malio Cardarelli’s “Cornerstone of Pride: History of Utica Free Academy.”

A charter was drawn up one year later.

In 1853, Utica Academy became Free Academy when tuition no longer was required.

Marilyn Bremer graduated in 1949, but remembers how you could meet a person from all the way across the city going to school at UFA.

“It was city-wide, kind of a melting pot type of thing,” she said.

It’s a positive experience she and her husband, Richard — a founding member of the current Alumni Association — were happy to pass on to two of their children who went to the same academy before it closed in 1987.

Doling out scholarships to city high school students is the main way that the Alumni Association and the academy keep giving back, Thompson said.

A generous posthumous donation from alumna Mary Stirling Kramer, Class of 1940, has swelled the association’s fund of $175,000. To date, $68,300 has been given out.

“I think that’s the most important thing we do,” Thompson said. “It’s how we keep the name alive.”

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