The old song about “reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick” brings to mind the three Rs of education – along with the corporal punishment once thought to be necessary to gain the attention of young minds.
As it is today, education of the children was a task, a challenge, a responsibility, a vocation and sometimes a joy for those involved from the earliest years of New Bern and Craven County.
At right is a 1799 recruitment for a teacher from a local newspaper, the Newbern Gazette. It offers country employment to “a person qualified to keep school”; the elements of which would be “to teach children the rudiments of their mother tongue and initiate them in the first lines of science.”
Gazette in July, 1799 seeks a school teach of English and Science
(We’re not sure what to make of the fact that initiate is misspelled in the advertisement for a teacher.)
The arrangement at the time was schooling by private subscription. A teacher would be hired, a space located for the school, and parents would pay on a monthly or quarterly basis for the lessons of their youngsters.
It would be four decades, after the ad above, before a system of “common schools” was at work in the county. The law creating the Common Schools in North Carolina passed the state legislature in 1939 and schools began operation in Craven County in 1840 and 1841. By the time of the Civil War, some 48 one-room school houses were serving the county from Maplecypress in the north to Adams Creek in the south, and many places in between.
Usually a single teacher taught from 15 to 30 students. Most teachers were male and the pay hovered around a whopping $22 per month. The county school board – called the Board of Superintendents – elected the head superintendent, set policy and selected the school books. Each school district had its own three-member school committee to supervise the teacher, and approve bills and the teacher’s pay.
Members were elected and were almost always male. Most who served were the prominent, propertied men of the county – and men were the only ones who got to vote. Very occasionally, a woman would be elected.
In February 1848, district superintendent C.B. Wood reported that at Riverdale the students were being taught, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, English grammar and orthography.
Orthography?
That would be spelling.
by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
Eddie Ellis is the author of New Bern History 101 and other works about Craven County’s rich heritage. He can be reached at flexspace2@aol.com.