I was born in 1910 and I have spent all my life in Isle of Wight County. I grew up in the Moonlight Road Community and went to the Gravel Hill School. The building was the Odd Fellow’s Hall, also called the Fishermen’s Home. It had two rooms, one upstairs for the Odd Fellow’s use and one downstairs that they allowed us to use for school. We had 75 to 80 children in that room, grades one through six. Well, they could go to the seventh grade, but they would drop out. No where in my mind can I remember anybody getting as far as the seventh grade. Seven years old was the typical age for starting to school then. We went to school four or five months to the year with school starting in October.
I was eight years old, but there were also young men there who would be 10 or 12 or in their teens because you couldn’t make any headway by going to school only five months at a time. So when I came in at seven, I was able to catch up with those who had just gone five months.
My first teacher, Mrs. Mattie Brown, was a very, very good teacher. She did not stand in fear of any of the children. I’ve seen her whip a 16 year old boy because he didn’t behave himself. I’ve seen her fight them just like she was a man. You had to obey that one teacher. I don’t care if she didn’t get there until 10 o’clock, you waited until she got there. She came in and would have her prayer and her song and then she started her lesson. Once she started it, you listened to her.
I remember the primer with Kate, Dick and Jane, O.K., then you went to the second grade and you had a “Stepping Stone” and you went on like that. We had physiology, health, history, geography and spelling by the time we got to the fifth grade. Spelling was very, very important. I can remember very well you would have spelling one day, reading one day, and you’d have English. You might get two subjects a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon because with 75-80 children, the teacher couldn’t get around to all of them. And one of the things that bothered me very much was when I was in math class, I only got to page 40 and it certainly worried me all these years—ha, ha. Fortunately my father went as far as the ninth grade in school and he was very good and he could help us out. He could spell backwards just as good as he could forward.
By the time I got to the fifth grade—it was only three of us in it—the teacher decided she could not run the fifth grade with three children. So she held us back and did not let us go the sixth grade. But I did get to the seventh grade. You got very little education then, but whatever you learned you didn’t forget it—even if you didn’t go to school but five months to the year.
The book Many Voices was published in 1986 as part of a project of the Interview Committee appointed in 1984 for the Isle of Wight County 350th Sesquitricentennial Celebration. The Oral History project taped the recollections of our older citizens and developed their stories from the transcriptions. Many Voices gave a permanent record of the previously unrecorded family life and history in Isle of Wight County. These excerpts take only the discussions dealing with the education memories of some of those citizens.