residents of Greenspond petitioned the government to appoint Thomas Walley as lay reader and teacher. Mr. Thomas Walley read in the church every Sunday and was capable of teaching the children to read and write. Therefore, residents John Edgar, Thomas Read, Nathanial Smith, and James Cram wrote to the S.P.C.K. asking them to pay a salary to Mr. Walley so he could be the school master. On October 25, 1815, The Newfoundland Governor at the time, wrote that Mr. Walley was being given 15 pounds per annum by the government to read prayers on Sunday in the absence of a missionary. He was also appointed school master and was given 30 pounds for two years. Thomas Walley continued to teach there until 1825 when he moved to Gooseberry Island to serve as schoolmaster there. In a letter, written by Archdeacon George Coster on July 21, 1827, he said Greenspond had started building a house and schoolroom, and that the Newfoundland School Society promised to send a teacher. The first Newfoundland School Society teacher in Greenspond was a Mr. and Mrs. William King who left England and came to Greenspond in 1828. They opened the day school with 34 children, and the Sunday School with 54 children. In an 1829–1830 school report, it said the school in Greenspond was nearly completed and that the attendance was 56 children attending day school and 26 adults attending the night school. By 1831 there were 111 children in day school, 142 children in Sunday School, and 49 adults in night school. These numbers were unprecedented for a small community in Newfoundland during this period. Mr. Benjamin Fleet succeeded Mr. and Mrs. King when he arrived in August 1832 and began school. In 1839, Mr. Robert Dyer arrived from England and stayed for 20 years as the teacher in Greenspond. The Newfoundland School Society maintained a very successful elementary school in Greenspond. In 1844, for example, there was an average attendance of 103 children and by May 1847, 119 girls and 110 boys were recorded on the attendance, a total of 229 students. In 1850 Robert Dyer recorded in his diary that a visiting judge, Judge Des Barres, had claimed that the school in Greenspond was the "largest in the island". In 1852 Dyer recorded an attendance of 283, shortly after, Dyer made a request for an infant school, and in 1854 the number on