Interview with Mrs. Edna Drewery Newman
September 16, 2003
Interview by Sandra M. Lowe
Mrs. Newby was living at the Riverside Convalescent Home in Smithfield when we met there. She attended the Pope’s Avenue School in 1915.
E.N. more children to it then. But they all went to the one at Isle of Wight. I graduated there. My oldest brother and sister did go to Windsor, but the others never went anywhere else.
Q: Of those schools that you mentioned, which ones would have had no more than three rooms?
A: First Avenue, the one I went to the first two years. All the other ones were larger. Yeah, they were high schools. Isle of Wight High School and Windsor High School.
Q: What years are we talking about now? What years would you have gone to the first, second and third grade?
A: I turned six in November of 1915, and I could have gone to school there in January. They come for me, but my daddy was down in bed sick, so mama had all she could do. I realize that now. It didn’t make me feel good then because I wanted to go, but I didn’t get to start until September and I went that one school year and the next school year, and then in 1918 I finished up two years there, (in May) and was supposed to go another year, but when September came, all of us were out ready to go to school, the teacher came out and said her husband wouldn’t let her teach, so it really didn’t run anymore after 1918. But I really don’t know what year it was started. I started there in ‘16.
Q: Through discussions with people in the neighborhood or your brothers or sisters you don’t have any other information on how old the Pope’s Avenue School would be?
A: I don’t reckon it’s anybody living that went there any older than I am! All the older ones are gone! I was a little one there then.
Q: Do you know why it was called Pope’s Avenue? Was that the name of the area there?
A: The road probably was an avenue from some folk’s farm or something back in there, because it goes on back in there and comes out near Central Hill. I _________________________
farm or something back in there, because it goes on back in there and comes out near Central Hill.
Q: Mrs. Newman, you grew up in Isle of Wight County?
A: Yes, I was born and raised here. Not always in one house, though.
Q: You lived in several places. What area would you consider to have been your home?
A: Poorhouse Road.
Q: Give us a little direction as to where that would be.
A: You turn off the road to get to town. The way it got its name…the county owned the farm. On the corner of this road, and the one that runs from Isle of Wight, or at least from Smithfield, all the way to Windsor. So if you were telling somebody directions, say, when you get to the courthouse, going toward Smithfield, the first road you get to, turn off to your right, and you’re on Poorhouse Road. And it’s about two miles long, so there wasn’t much you could get confused with...farm on the right - that’s way it got its name. Just turn off the poorhouse until it got the name, Poorhouse Road. My brother owns the family farm and lives there now.
Q: Do you have any other sisters or brothers?
A: There were six of us. There are only four of us living now.
Q: Did your sisters and brothers pretty much attend the same elementary school that you went to?
A: Yes, because I started at the one room school, went there two years, then a year I didn’t have any school because they were supposed to run another year, and the teacher (…) so they decided it wasn’t worth going to the trouble to find another teacher for it. And we just stayed home and went to Windsor the next year. They were building a new school in Windsor. I went there from the time I was in the third grade and half way through the fifth, and our family outgrew the farm there, so Daddy sold it, and bought the one on Poorhouse Road, and added two houses I’m just assuming, because I really don’t know…but it had to have a reason for the name. It probably led to a farm back in there with the name of Pope.
Q: What do you remember about the grades that were taught there?
A: Well, now I’m interested in that. I mean that was something fascinated me because if I was faster than that other child, I didn’t have to stick with her. I’d go on up another level. You didn’t really get promoted by the grade thing. You went on up as you were ready for something or you got held back - and yet you didn’t fail because you just didn’t move til you got it! I don’t know that she ever gave report cards while I was going there. She might have, but I don’t remember it. When I went there, my mother had taught me at home and she let me go one day that January, but my brother cried all day. He heard me. We were close enough to the school we could hear the kids playing from our house. And so he knew I was falling down and getting dirty, somebody was hurting me, and he was crying. He was three years old. So she didn’t let me go anymore. I was more good to her stayed home, occupied his attention - with my father so ill, and so when I got home that day, she asked me what did the teacher let me read. I had my primmer with me and I showed her. She said, “Well I can teach you more than she has.” To make me feel good, she said, “We’ve already passed that.” What she was doing was trying to place me and didn’t let me go. So anyway, I knew how to write, make figures, and do some things. I think I was in the second primmer by the time I got started school, but when I went there two years - at the end of two years, I was reading with some of the oldest in school. I was spelling with the fifth grade and she said if she’d know she wasn’t going to teach the next year she would have given me a third grade arithmetic book. The she could have proven what I’d done and I could have gone on to the fourth grade, but, you see, we didn’t have as many subjects then as they do now. In second grade it was reading, writing, and ’rithmetic and that was it. But I’d gone into spelling you see, because I was going on up with the older grades and I guess if I’d gone the next year maybe I’d have found a history book or a geography book I wanted to read. That year I read everything I found to read.
Q: It was a good thing that they had sort of an ungraded system at that time where you could move at your own pace.
A: I would have gone on. I just got credit for two grades like I could prove, you see - but I really had gone beyond that in some things.
Q: What can you tell me about your teacher or teachers?
A: I had one teacher while I was there, except another one substituted for a short while. Her name was Miss Eska Crocker. E-s-k-a. Here father was Mr. Daniel Crocker. They were Mill Swamp people. She had two younger sisters. I can’t remember their names now. She taught us. She was a good teacher. Of course now the children of the first and second, and I think the third grade also went out to play early in the afternoon. It gave them more time with older children without us being in there…if it was weather fit to play outside. There was a girl I thought picked on me and I reckon I tattled on her. I think she did it to get attention. Her older sister would hop on her. I never got punished. I don’t even remember getting corrected. I kind of think I was the teacher’s pet now that I look back on it, because I don’t think I was any better than anybody else.
Q: You don’t think you actually got away with it…she just didn’t correct you?
A: I was the new kid in the neighborhood, see, and it made a difference. But I enjoyed her. She was a good teacher.
Q: And so you stayed with her through first and second and then you moved on to the other school?
A: Yes. We rode a wagon then. See, that school was all in walking distance. Everybody in my neighborhood. Now, one year we had snow deep enough that the boy she later married, he build a sled, hitched the team to it, and took us all on a hayride to school. That was the most exciting thing to do, for sure! I walked to school with her because we were on an avenue than ran at an angle out to the main road. There were other children down there. That girl that I thought picked on me - and her sister, they walked down there too from farther up. All of them would come on down to my house. The crowd across the road from her - we called that the Poquoson they lived in - they’d come on to where she lived and come on through the yard, come out the back gate and we’d all walk to school from my house together, and the others would join us as we got down the road.
Q: So that sleigh ride was something you didn’t forget. How far do you think it was from your house to the school?
A: I don’t know how to measure distance. There was just one farm between us. I don’t think it was more than two or three city blocks. It wasn’t long. We had our programs up there. We had a Christmas program. I held a doll baby in a rocking chair. My part was to sing a song to my doll baby in that rocking chair. Oh, it was a beautiful doll. When springtime came and we had school closing they put a platform out in front, and people brought chairs and benches, and I think up in that upstairs…I believe there were benches up there, and we may have been using benches downstairs some too. I can’t remember, but I think we had double desks in most cases downstairs, but they put all of that for people to sit on. I don’t know how we had light. I think we had an afternoon Christmas program, because we didn’t have any lights in there.
Q: Now was this at Pope’s Avenue?
A: Pope’s Avenue. There were no lights in there that I know of. They might have carried lamps up there for something, but I think that if I’m not mistaken, when we had our Christmas program it was probably Sunday school and school combined because there was no denominational Sunday school in the afternoon on Sunday. It was horse and buggy days. There was one automobile in the neighborhood, and it was too far to drive to their church sometime, so we’d have a Sunday school there. We went to our church, went in the morning, come back and went there in the afternoon, and in summertime well, in the wintertime, because people had lights in their home, we’d have prayer meetings every Sunday night in somebody’s home. And if you wanted that particular Sunday night, at Sunday school that afternoon, you’d tell them they’re at my house tonight. No big preparation.
Q: The Pope’s Avenue school, you said had one room, but it had an upstairs?
A: It had an upstairs.
Q: What else did they use the building for? Anything?
A: Nothing, that I know of. Now we went in - there was an entrance, like a vestibule, across the front, and you hung your coats out there, your lunch boxes out there and we went on in. The second year we went there, we did no more than get started when some boys - I reckon out-of-school teenagers or something…I think some of them knew who they were…but they threw stuff in the well. So people were digging peanuts and didn’t have time to clean it out, and we had to start carrying water from home. I don’t know whether I took a half a gallon or a quart. I know some took them larger than I did and I already had a glass cup I took. You carried your own cup to drink out of when the water was drawn from the well. There was a boy who didn’t have any boys his age to play with. He played with me and the other girls, but he was a couple of years older than I was. Anything he did, I wanted to do the same thing - at least as well, if not better. So when he turned that jug up, so did I. Got a broken tooth today to show for it! Got chipped off. We hadn’t hardly got used to that when three drunks, they said, went to the school one night, broke in, made a fire, didn’t know what they were doing, turned out set fire to the building. Burned everything up. So Mr. Gavin Carr - that was in front of his house that our avenue ended - he had in his front yard what you called an office. My grandmother had one. Everyone that had a farm had that one room out in the yard they called an office, and if they had a lot of children, the boys slept out there, in some cases, and others used it for other things. So he cleaned it out - I think he used it for storage. He cleaned it out and we went in there. It was a little bit small, but we managed. And I remember went across the road for Halloween. I know that it was before the end of October. We went across the road and pulled pine tags and she carried needles and thread up there and we strung them to decorate our room with. We put them across the windows and places, and I think we did the same thing at Christmas, but I don’t know what we did about a Christmas program there, but I think we had one. Had Sunday school there, too. Was a little crowded, but we had it. And that gave Mr. Holland, Richard Holland, a chance to clean out a two-room house he had on his farm and take the partition out and gave us a large room. So, we moved in to there and that’s where we finished up the second year. We were there in time to have Christmas. I remember the Christmas program there. I don’t know whether we had to have outside program there either. I believe we had the commencement program - that building was big enough we had it all on the inside. Now we didn’t have no toilets up there. I think we had them at the school - that was built for the school, but there we didn’t. The boys went to one side of the woods, and the girls went the other. And we played in the woods. I think some of the older boys did it for us. We’d take a smooth branch - cut it off a tree, and nail it to two trees. We called them actin’ poles. Well, we could “skin the cat”, do most anything on it coming along, but we didn’t have the girls on the same side - see, the girls didn’t wear pants then. We wore bloomers and we couldn’t go out there and “skin the cat” with them on. That was something we enjoyed doing - that was running and running free. During those years if we had to play indoors, we’d play something like thimble - “Whose got the thimble?” and I’ve forgotten all of them. We’d play games, we’d sit down and play, and outdoors we’d play “Ring-around-the-Rosey” and “London Bridge”, little games like that. The last day of school, this boy I was referring to, George Lawrence, had a little sister who wasn’t going to school. He brought her that last day of the last year we went to school there. And Howard Bradshaw was the oldest boy, the biggest boy in school - don’t know that he was the oldest, but he was the biggest. He’d gone home for lunch and their home was on one side of that branch and the school was on the other and he came down the road yelling. We were playing in the road and in the branch, and he was running. At first I didn’t know what he was saying. And then he was saying, “Get out the road. Get out the road.” And two of the older girls grabbed that little Lucille, one by each hand, and drug her up a bank - to get out the road; they had to run up a bank. He was chasing a mad dog down the road. As he went on farther, he was yelling to other people, and the dog went by a house past our house. A man was there, had tied his horse in the road, and gone in to visit, but the dog in that yard ran to the fence after this dog (….) his horse had bit that dog. So, that was the most exciting thing, I reckon, happened when I was going there.
Q: You mentioned that you remembered graduation or celebration?
A: I don’t think there was any graduation.
Q: How many do you know that would have finished the seventh grade?
A: I really don’t know. I know that I went to something. I don’t know whether they finished or dropped out. I know Howard didn’t go back that year, but none of us went back after that year, and so some of them might have had another year if they’d had gone, but they just quit then and went on to farming and stayed with their daddies.
Q: During those two years that you had the one room school, about how many children do you think would have been in that room there?
A: In that room? I think there were anywhere between maybe 18 and 20. I don’t know who dropped out for the second year, and I don’t know of more than one or two that started that second year, and I could name fifteen to eighteen children, and I feel like the ones that came in off the Pope’s Avenue Road…I don’t remember anybody coming in that direction, but I feel like there might have been somebody over there, but I could name all of those that I went with.
Q: How did she have them divided up in the classroom?
A: The older the grade, the farther back they sat. The little ones sat to the front. First grade, you might say, had the very front. Second grade and on back.
Q: How did your day start? What do you remember about that?
A: I think, if I’m not mistaken, we sung a song, and she read scripture and we had a prayer, and then she called the roll. And as she called the roll, you answered with a verse of scripture. I had that being done in another school too. See that used to be all right. It was more or less the teachers. I think when I was in the graded schools, I think it was more or less what the teacher wanted, but I remember answering the roll call with a verse of scripture.
Q: You mentioned that you read a lot in those first couple of years…do you recall any of your text- books?
A: Well, when I was going to school, there wasn’t much in my house to read. We got our Sunday school material. Mama and Daddy and all of us got our, you know, Sunday school books, and we had them from two Sunday schools. At our church we were given a magazine. It was about half big as a newspaper. It was called Kind Words, and every family got that, and I read it. Anything that came in the mail, I read it. I read the Bible. I just read what I got hold to and sometimes I’d borrow books from somebody that had a book I wanted. I liked to read.
Q: How long was your school day?
A: I think we started at nine and ended at three. I may be wrong, it might have been three-thirty, but it was around in that area.
Q: What do you remember about your lunch and recess?
A: Well, you carried your lunch from home, and most everybody, I think had those metal boxes, and we ate it at lunchtime. I think we had thirty minutes to play and eat. It seems to me we had a break earlier than that. I don’t know that we had anything else, but I think we had, during the morning - it seems like we had a ten or fifteen minute break.
Q: Now, you’ve told us how the children were separated in the classroom. What was involved with the furniture? How was the room separated off?
A: It was just the teacher…the teacher set to the front. Her desk was about this big, I think.
Q: About three feet across?
A: I’ll tell you, they were using desks just like it in old Petersburg Hospital for the nurses. When I went there, there was one on each floor. And you know what? That’s where the records were. That’s where the books were. You signed in and out and all that if you were working there. I went in one day - I was an aide, and I went in one Sunday afternoon, and she told me she had three for me to watch in particular, but she wanted me to do the vital signs, and I didn’t have a watch. She said well, don’t worry about the rest. I’ve got two in the labor room, and one is in her own room. Watch those three. And I said, “I don’t have a watch.” She said, “Look in the desk and get Dr. Moore’s.” She was in the delivery room. I used her watch, and I happen to think - how many could go in and lay their watch down today? So I stayed on the floor to watch it til I went up there. The only nurse on the floor was helping her. See they were in their forties. Everybody was scarce. But she had a desk like that.
Q: Was there anything else in the room besides the teacher’s desk?
A: I can’t remember what might have been. We had a stove, and the boys brought the wood in. I think the parents probably had it up there, and had it cut the right length, or sawed it the right length to start with. The boys would split it if it had to been, but most of the time it was split and they’d bring that in, but now the teacher saw to that floor being swept.
Q: Would she designate that for some of the students to do?
A: I can’t remember. See, we played outside and the older children went for their classes, and when they finished to come out, we’d all walk on home. It may have been an older girl or too stayed to help her. I think every teacher - like you see these mountain movies - you know, where the teacher done it all. And I think it was about like that anywhere.
Q: Did she have any aids up on the wall?
A: I can’t remember that she did, and of course, the school burning down…if we had any, they were gone.
Q: Was there a cloakroom?
A: Uh-huh, they that entrance that you hung your coat in…and we put lunch boxes out there, but when we got to the other two buildings, now there was no such thing. I think they had the hooks on the wall for us.
Q: What do you recall about discipline and punishment?
A: Standing in the corner, and I think making them write something. I didn’t have to do that…but standing in the corner and keeping them in are about the only ones I know. I don’t think there was any paddle used in anybody’s hand there. It was used in schools though. When we went to the graded school at Isle of Wight after we’d been to Windsor, the teacher that would teach down there that had the third grade - and she used a paddle, and one day I saw my cousin standing out on the back porch to his room and a little girl was standing there with a dipper of water (…………….) We were across the road, where the Academy is now. And see, all those rooms had outside entrances with porches, and the pump was broken down so they were hauling the buckets of water over from the clerk’s office - that pump over there, and had a dipper - and you had your own things to drink out of, and so they had a bucket of water there - he had his hands held out and she was pouring water on both of them, so the teacher hadn’t gotten one hand - she got both that day. Later on I run into her - she taught in Petersburg, and I was working up there and we were going down the street together, and she sat down on the bus, and she said, “Edna I don’t use the paddle anymore like I used to.” The rules had changed, and she couldn’t.
Q. Do you have any other positive memories of your days at Pope’s Avenue?
A: I had some good times there - playing with friends and we had programs. I know one time…we were in last building, and that must have been the Christmas that I was in the second grade….
Q: And you were still calling it Pope’s Avenue, were you?
A: We called it Pope’s Avenue. It was still the Pope’s Avenue School. Just moved its location.
Q: That’s when you were in the small, one-room part? That had been used as an office?
A: It was back off the corner here, well then it burned, so this man over on the road let them use a little house. This man down the road put a bigger house out for us, and that’s where we were when I did something, and these three grown-up, they might have been teen-agers…to me they were men, they just called me back more and more. They picked on me, and one of them used to laugh about it after we were all grown. He lived - my sister got married and lived next door to him and his family. He used to tell her how they teased me.
Q: Any negative memories?
A: Not really, because even though the girl picked on me and I cried…I think the teacher made her go in and sit down. I don’t think she was doing it to be mean. I think she just found I was the whiney, crying type and that’s all one like that needs…because I was kind of “babyfied”. Now, what I wore to school might be of interest to you. When school started, my mother made me a pink checked dress of gingham, blue checked gingham, and trimmed them with solid, and then she made me a bonnet to match each one. The bonnet was plain fabric, made the brim - the check fabric made the crown. She didn’t put any gathers in it. She put buttonholes in it, and on the stiff part, she had buttons - and when she put mine together, see, it button-gathered - and then those loops between every one, and I tied it together around my head. And I was dressed up. A little bonnet and dress to match!
Q: Sounds pretty.
A: It was. It was a comfortable thing to have, too.
Q: I have just one last question for you. If you would, please give a little autobiographical sketch of some of your highlights after school, leading up to today.
A: Well, I think I told you where I was born. I was born on a farm near Raynor. We moved near the courthouse, and we live there until I was five. And Daddy bought the farm, but we didn’t move there. We moved across the road, and we lived over there a year. We moved to the other place when I was six. Then we lived up there until I was twelve and went to Windsor school after Pope’s Avenue was closed. I went to Windsor, and I was in the fifth grade when we moved from Windsor and moved to the farm on Poorhouse Road, and I finished at Isle of Wight, graduated there in ‘28.
Q: And after high school, what did you do?
A: Well, I took a part of a business course, but times were getting tight along then, and didn’t have the money to go away to school with it, so I went to work in Petersburg after a while, and worked there until I retired at 67, and lived up there until I came down here in 2001, over in Magnolia Manor. Somebody called my brother’s house and asked why was I coming here to live - somebody with Social Services…somebody connected with something…why was I coming here, when I’d worked all my life in Petersburg? She said because all her friends up there are dead, and she’s come home! My family looks after me good down here.
Q: Did you want to give us a little information about your family? Did you marry? Do you have children?
A: I have one son. He was my husband’s son. I adopted him, and he was born in ‘46. He’s fifty something now…what is he? Fifty-three, four? He has two daughters and one son - now, his, I can tell you the ages! His daughter will be 30 in November, the boy will be 28 in January, the other girl will be 26 in January. They’re lined up where I can handle them. And I have six great-grandsons. They range in age from one year to thirteen. There are three of them that have been coming to see me for three Sundays. The oldest granddaughter has three sons - she has a 13, an 11 and a 4 year-old. So, the first Sunday they were coming they had car trouble. They didn’t make it. The next Sunday they were coming, the four-year-old waked up with infected ears. They didn’t make it. So she called me the next Sunday, and she said, “I’m not even going to try with all this rain. My tires are not quite what I’d want them to be to go that distance. So we’re not going, but I’m going to go one Sunday.”
A: The live near McKinney. Over there in Dinwiddie. Her oldest son - he’s passed every year, but it was hard work, so he’s in the seventh grade. The other son, he passed every year, and it was easy…until now, and he wasn’t doing to suit her, so they put him…she said, “If I’ve got to take one, I might as well take another.” The oldest boy didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay where he was. She’s taking them to Hopewell to a private school. It’s a church school. I think her idea is that they’re going to change schools next year. Her husband works up in northern Virginia, and it’s a long drive from home, they’re around Washington, Fredericksburg…one place or another, so she said they’re going up there, but he won’t have such a long trip. They’re going to sell the farm and move up there, and I think she wanted all the children to be on a good level, because up there the schools really do have a higher standard than some of us. I’ll tell you this one thing. When we were out of school forty years, we had our first reunion, and we’ve had three or four since then but we’re down to four now. One lives in the nursing home in Waverly, I’m living here, another one lives in Suffolk - legally blind, but she’s in her own home, and one’s down North Carolina in assisted living, or something, a nursing home down there…and we got together in April, in Waverly with the one up there, and used their recreation room and had a party for our 75th anniversary. We had the superintendent of the public schools there. What’s his name…McPherson or something? And we had Billy K. Barlow.
Q: This was for high school reunion?
A: Uh-huh. 75th!
Q: And you graduated from where?
A: Isle of Wight. We were the largest class the school ever had. There were 17 and 16 graduated. When I moved there, the fifth grade was the largest class in school. It took an old room…that old room that was a teacher age…we filled it up! And so we never did drop down to where…when we got to the eighth grade, they had to move desks out there and shove in more to make room to make place for us to be in high school. We couldn’t change classes because there wasn’t anywhere we could change to.
Q: When you had your reunion, was there anyone there that you recognized from Pope Avenue?
A: It had been so long, honey…those Pope’s Avenue folks, I can’t remember if any of them changed to Isle of Wight. I think some did, because…they might have…I went to school in Windsor with them. Yes, I did. I went to school in Isle of Wight with a few, but those my age are all dead. The girls I played with, the boy turned out to be a minister, but he’s dead, and so is his wife. I have to look around to find somebody that knows anything about my past!
Q. Well, I thank you for coming in here today and I really appreciate the information and you’re the first person I’ve talked to from Pope’s Avenue.
A. I don’t think you’ll find anyone more Pope’s Avenue students.
Q. \What are some of the other schools besides Comet and Pope’s Avenue that had small 1-2 or 3 rooms?
A. They had one that they called “Line Pine”, l-i-n-e marking off property, it was a pine tree there that was between people's property…and they called it “Line Pine School”.
Q. I do recall that I had that school on a list. Any other ones that you can think of?
A. There was another one they had up there in Collosse. I don’t know what the name was. It was in that area, the south part of Isle of Wight County. There was a school for the black children across the street from us. Ebenezer, that’s what that was. On Poorhouse Road.