Mrs. Mary Bell Ross

I went to a little school called Seven Wives Hall.  There would be about two dozen or three dozen children there.  I had a little primer.  “Ducks on the Pond,” and all like that was in it.  We had a first reader, second reader, third reader and a fourth and fifth reader.  But I didn’t go through the fifth reader but got the fifth reader from another girl and read it myself.  My first teacher was named Portia Jimson, from Smithfield.  We walked to school—about four miles—six months to the year, but I didn’t go all six months because we had work we had to do.  Later on, we did have nine months.  We set on a bench and wrote in our lap.  We had a little slate board.

Before we went to school, we had to go in the woods and chop wood for my mother who was kind of sickly—she wasn’t very well.  We children had to go in the woods and bring the wood to the woodpile and cut it up and bring it to the back side of the door so my mother would have some fire during the day.  Then after school, we had to do the same thing—get in our wood for the night. 

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.