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Memories of a Long Life                                            9

Well, the last day came, and it was a great day, but not one person is living that was there during the school or attended the closing exercises, male or female, but the one who is doing this writing, and I am hoping to live to write some little incidents of what happened when I went to school and after I was teaching.

 

            Mr. Thomas Harris, Mr. David Clegg, Mr. Luther Clegg, Mr. And Mrs. Wright, and some of the other people, got timber and built a (note: "school") house; the playground was on the edge of my father’s land.  The house had two rooms with a chimney at each end, half way between a partition, so the teacher could have a view of each.  An educated lady from Syracuse, New York, came not only well up in a knowledge of the books, but she had the gift to understand children.  Her plan of training the little ones was wonderful, not only in the books, for she would try to teach us all to sit correct and to walk with arms and shoulders erect for the sake of good health.  All her talking was in a quiet, subdued voice.  She spent some years, and our love and confidence were as true when she left us as at the first term.  She was teaching when the war commenced between the North and South.  There were two companies made up in Chatham, one was called the Chatham Rifles, and a squad it was called, about 30 in number, came out all dressed in their uniform.  They marched around, then came to a halt and faced each other.  We girls all, two by two, marched and presented each of the soldiers with a bouquet of flowers.  We had a table and dinner, my father built the table and had a shoat barbecued.  Miss Mary J. Brooks was our teacher’s name, and she named the school “Woodville School.”  Well, as she was raised in New York and all her people lived there, she went back North but was some time getting home: after Lee surrendered.  All seemed to be as before she left, she wrote me, and encouraged me not to give up, nor did I.  I had been through an examination, got a certificate to teach a public school at Hopkins, a schoolhouse built on the road that was called the main or public road that ran from the little town of Haywood to the coal mine.  When the state was voting for a capital, Raleigh only had one more vote than Haywood, many said, as it was right where Deep River and Haw River run together.  Rocky River runs into Deep River, New Hope into Haw River, just below the two run together and make the Cape Fear.

 

            My first school was at Hopkins in the fall of 1864, but as I did not commence until late, and stopped for Christmas and did not commence until some weeks had passed, the weather was very disagreeable.  One old grandmother living in Greensboro said that she went to school to me there and that was all that she ever went.  One old woman now