I have a picture of my grandmother, Bertha Tollena Manning, about 14 years of age, inside one of the old school houses.  She is sitting at a desk, I believe.  Paula Baker Researching Cole, Wilkerson, Norman, and White in Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana and Baker, Tyson, Manning, and Stocks in North Carolina "We are not free, separate, and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way." Thomas Mann ________________________________ From: Roger E. Kammerer <kammerer@hotmail.com> To: PCFR PCFR <nc-pcfr@rootsweb.com> Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 5:15:56 PM Subject: [NC-PCFR] Remembering the Old Country Schools Remembering the Old Country Schools             The days of the little one room school house where students would trudge in all kinds of weather is only a memory. The last one teacher school in Pitt County, the Ellis School, on the east side of Tar Road, was consolidated with other schools in 1950 and the students were transported to bigger and better schools. Many of the remaining older people raised in the country still remember with fondness their little neighborhood country school.             Since the arrival of settlers into Pitt County there has always been an interest in education. From old records we know that there were some school teachers in the county in the 1770’s. In 1786 an Act of NC General Assembly changed the name of Martinsborough to Greenville and incorporated the Pitt Academy. This started Greenville’s long history of schools and academies.             Certainly Plantation owners and families with means would get together and build a community school house or academy and hire itinerant teachers to teach their children.  In “King’s Sketches of Pitt County” he writes that around 1810...“Conditions then existing in the State applied to Pitt County. It might be called a primitive age, an age of simplicity. At this time there was not a public school in the State. The great mass of the people could neither read nor write, education being the accomplishment of the few and wealthy. There were few private schools. The school house was built of logs, with a dirt chimney; a log was sawed out at one side for a window; the seats were made of split logs, the split side being somewhat smoothed and supported on round legs driven in holes bored in the underside, and such seats had no backs; a shelf built to one side of the house answered for a desk for writing, the pupil sitting on one of the benches; the floor was of rough- hewn timber, with many and large holes that let in the cold in winter. The teacher was held in little esteem and was practically a servant and nurse for the smaller children. The teacher was generally a woman, practically imported from New England, and generally ended her career in the school room by marrying the son of the house and causing a row in the family. The teacher's pay was a pittance.” By 1850, it appears from the Superintendent of Common Schools report that most of the teachers in Pitt County were men.             In October 1817, The Pleasant Grove Academy opened on the road leading from Greenville to Charles Jenkins Store (near Rountree’s Church). The trustees were Jonathan Frizzle, Charles Jenkins, Jesse Rountree and James Powell. They advertised that” all the various branches in English, Latin and Greek Languages, will be taught in this Academy, and every exertion used to improve the Morals of the pupils.”             By 1830 the spirit of education come over the people of Pitt County and the State. The Greenville Female Academy was chartered in 1830. The incorporators were Gen. William Clark, Archibald Parker, John C. Gorham, Richard Evans, and Absalom Saunders. The Clemmons Academy (in Carolina Township) was chartered in 1831, with Willie Gurganus, Thomas E. Chance, Edmund Andrews and William Clemmons, as Trustees. The Contentnea Academy (near the Moye’s Cross Roads near Farmville) was incorporated the same year with Moses Turnage, Lewis Turnage, Abram Baker, Elbert Moye, William D. Moye and Alfred Moye, as Trustees. The Jordan Plain Academy (located about two miles north of Pactolus, on the Williamston Road) was incorporated in 1832 with Hugh Telfair, Thomas Jordan, Valentine Jordan, Benjamin F. Eborn, James Little and Churchill Perkins, as Trustees. .             In 1840 Common Schools were established across the State and Superintendents of Common Schools were elected for each county.  According to the 1848 Pitt County Common School Report, Alfred Moye was the Chairman of the Pitt County Superintendents of Common Schools and there were 31 school districts in Pitt County. Tax money was raised for upkeep of the schools and to pay the teachers.  Eventually teacher’s knowledge was tested and the subjects taught standardized.  Under the law of 1852, the Chairmen of the Board of County Superintendents was authorized to refuse to pay any Teacher who did not hold a regular Certificate from the Committee of Examination for his county; and these Certificates had to be annually renewed, and were good only in the county they were given.             In January 1845, Josiah Barrett advertised to the public that he had employed a teacher from up North and again opened his Academy near Joyner’s Crossroads, Pitt County. He invited those who wished to give their children a good education to enroll at his school. Subjects taught were the usual spelling, reading, writing, grammar and arithmetic. Astonishingly, also included were “Geography, Rhetoric, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Botany, Trigonometry, Algebra, Geometry, Surveying, and Ancient and Modern Languages.” Board could be had with respectable families in the neighborhood for $4.00 a month.             A pioneer Pitt County educator, Mrs. William Henry Smith, better known by her friends as “Aunt Pollie Nelson Smith,” (1825-1907), is honored for doing more for the education of poor children in Pitt County than any dozen people in it. Being a busy mistress of a large plantation and raising children, she began teaching her and her neighbor’s children in 1845. According to an autobiographical sketch she stated “she had to study her grammar as she taught it having never studied it at school.” She further wrote, “she mastered it and taught it successfully.” She taught in a small one room school house on the plantation, but eventually had to give it up because of family duties. Her husband hired a teacher and the school ran until 1869 when the financial burden forced it to close. In 1870, seeing the need for educating her seven children, Pollie Nelson Smith set up a school on the second floor of her house. This school grew to again include the children in the neighborhood and the school removed to the one room school house on the plantation. The school continued to grow and with the help of a noted NC educator, John Ghost Elliot, a large two story school house was built in 1882 to teach the numerous students. She taught her last school in 1901 and seven of her children, twenty one grandchildren and fifteen great grandchildren became teachers in Pitt County and elsewhere.             In 1924, an old Confederate veteran wrote an article to the local newspaper about the early country school he attended as a child at Hollywood, Pitt County. “I remember well the first day I went to school, it was in August 1857. I was six years old, never had been in a school room before and was very bashful. I had to walk 2 ½ miles. As I entered the door, the first thing that attracted my attention was the teacher, an old man, sitting in an old rickety chair and a long switch near by his side. Of course I didn’t like the looks of that much. My next attention was given to the house and furniture. The house was about 16 feet square, built of logs, covered with shingles. It had one door, two very small windows, a dirt chimney, with a fireplace about 8 feet wide. The cracks between the boards, with about half of them torn off, gave plenty of ventilation, especially in cold weather. The furniture consisted of four benches about 14 feet long, being the slabs, sawed off of popular logs, with legs put in, with an average of about two feet high, so the children could swing their feet to their own heart’s content. Also there was a writing desk sitting across the middle of the room in proportion in height to the benches. Our water supply was from a hole dug near the side of a branch. The hole was about four feet deep, and three feet wide and five or six feet long at the top. Dug with a slant from the top so that the children could walk down and dip and drink all they wanted. Our school year was about three school months divided in two parts, first beginning about the middle of July and continuing for about six weeks, then stop and house the crop and do what else there was to be done. School started again about the fifteenth of October and continued for about six weeks more, then came the end with no commencement and no picnic.”             Other complaints made about these early schools were the muddy roads, no bathroom facilities and ticks on the path to the school. In Feb. 1903 a freak occurrence happened when a wind storm blew over a public school house in Swift Creek township. The school was in session at the time, but none of the pupils were injured, though several were badly frightened. Because of the damage to the building the school had to suspend for the remainder of the term.             Eventually every small community and crossroads in Pitt County had a school house. With the large consolidation of the schools in 1938, most of the little country school houses were sold off to become private residences, tenant houses and barns. Thankfully someone at the Board of Education took snapshots of a large number of these small country school houses. They were preserved in scrapbooks and later saved from the trash by an alert secretary who knew their value to Pitt County history. William B. Kittrell, the noted Pitt County historian, borrowed the scrapbooks and had them scanned onto a CD. They now they can be viewed at Sheppard Memorial Library. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_skydrive_032009 Pitt County Family Researchers  website: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncpcfr/ Message archives address: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/index?list=nc-pcfr ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to NC-PCFR-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message