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The racial politics of Rockingham County in the nineteenth century reflected those of the broader region during this era and had great significance for education. In antebellum years, the access of some white children to academies and early common schools contrasted with the restrictions placed on African American youth in a slave society, who had little or no chance to achieve literacy. Despite the specific instances of Ku Klux Klan violence during the 1868-1870 terror campaign in the county and a return to white Democratic governance, the influence of Republicans’ biracial efforts had positive effects on schooling in the area. The progressive North Carolina 1868 Constitution and its mandate of uniform educational opportunities encouraged local school officials to create a system of county school districts in the 1870s that offered expanded schooling for the area’s students of both races. Although Rockingham County’s schools were segregated by race, as they were in the rest of North Carolina, there was an effort for several years, even after Republicans were no longer in charge in the county and in Raleigh, to make sure that schools for black students were available in each township, that teachers for both races were trained, and that local school committees were held accountable for the schools in their districts. Throughout the late 1800s, white and black schools were about equally funded, but over time and into the next century, separate white and “colored” committees and districts emerged in the county and, as a

result, black schools and teachers functioned more and more on their own. While the entire county was war-weary and struggled to recover after the Civil War ended in 1865, economically the late nineteenth century was largely defined by agricultural strength and commercial and industrial advancement. The county was also eventually marked by the deepening entrenchment of white supremacy into social, economic, and political

structures. In this environment, the public schools slowly emerged and grew along with the county. Schools for both races were sources of pride for their communities, as leaders continued to work out locally ways to build and support better educational opportunities for Rockingham County’s children.

Antebellum Education

Antebellum Rockingham County was not a place dominated by plantation slavery, but much of the political, economic, and social power was in the hands of a planter class, many of whom were slaveholders. A number of large two-story brick or frame homes where these prominent slaveholders lived dotted the riverways and the crude country roads. The largest slaveholder in the county was Dr. Edward T. Brodnax. In addition to Brodnax, who owned 174 slaves in 1860, other influential land and slave owners of the antebellum and Civil War era were Thomas S. Gallaway, Thomas Roach, David S. Reid, and Thomas Settle, Jr. The families of planters such as these had some access to private tutors or academies, so their power extended to educational opportunities as well.

Schooling was available to only a few of the white citizens of Rockingham County in the antebellum era, however. A small brick “plantation school” on the grounds of Judge Thomas Settle’s home east of Reidsville was one of the earliest places of learning in the

county. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the most privileged young men of Rockingham may have attended the academy of David Caldwell in Guilford County and studied Greek, Latin, and mathematics. One such student was the future judge and champion of public education, Archibald DeBow Murphey of nearby Caswell County, who recalled that Caldwell’s school was the “most prominent and useful” of the few schools available, but that obtaining an education for young men like himself was still difficult and opportunities “very limited.” Families sometimes joined together to employ a teacher for their children for a short tenure of two or three months, but otherwise, most whites had few educational opportunities.1

Access to education for whites was extended somewhat when the first “classical academies” were established in 1820 in the two towns of the county—Leaksville and Madison. Leaksville Academy was advertised in the 1820s as offering a course of study for young men that included “the sciences, the Latin and Greek languages, and English Grammar at thirty dollars per annum.” Teacher John Silliman emphasized the healthy environs “exempt from disease” as well as the debating society, whose purpose was “the improvement of the mind,” and the “collection of a library of valuable books” available to his students. Similarly, the Madison Academy, “situated in the west end of

1 Lindley S. Butler, Rockingham County: A Brief History (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History), 40-41, 45; Charles L. Coon, The Beginnings of

Public Education in North Carolina: A Documentary History, 1790-1840, Volume I (Raleigh: Edwards

& Broughton Printing Company, 1908), 22-23, Documenting the American South, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/coon976/menu.html; History of

Education in North Carolina, North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, 1993, 6. In

discussing slavery in the county, Butler also identified two known slave traders—R. G. Hopper and Anselom Reid—the latter who “circulated throughout the region with his coffle of slaves.” The original source of Murphey’s comments was an oration delivered at the University of North Carolina on June 27, 1827, and printed in the Raleigh (NC) Register, July 24, 1827.

Rockingham county,” advertised to potential students in 1820. The trustees of the new academy touted the qualifications of their teacher, Mr. James Franklin Martin, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, and the possibility of boarding young men with “good families” for “$30 per Session.”2 _{An academy was also opened in Wentworth}

at the Salem Church in 1843 as well as a school in the Belews Creek area in 1855. For other families, the academies available in nearby Caswell County, including several for young women, may have been of interest. As early as 1808, Caswell Academy was widely advertised as being modeled after the University in Chapel Hill, having an “elegant and complete set of Globes and Maps,” and being in a healthy setting where “every species of vice and immorality are checked in their infancy.”3

Both the schools in Leaksville and Madison were expanded in following decades. In Leaksville, a two-story brick building was constructed, and by 1839 there were

academies for both males and females. The young men were taught for a time by Patrick M. Henry, a descendant of the Revolutionary era orator. In the decade before the Civil

2 Butler, Rockingham County, 45; “Leaksville Academy Advertisement,” The (Raleigh, NC) Star, January 28, 1820 and “Madison Academy Advertisement,” Raleigh (NC) Register, June 23, 1820, both in Charles L. Coon, editor, North Carolina Schools and Academies (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1915), 345. Two other early academies in Rockingham County are listed as receiving state charters: Clio Montana Seminary in 1801 and Shady Grove Academy in 1825, by Stephen Beauregard Weeks, “Beginnings of the Common School System in the South,” in Report of the Commissioner for

Education, United States Bureau of Education (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898),

1394, 1399.

3 Butler, Rockingham County, 46; Coon, North Carolina Schools and Academies,18-33; “Advertisement for Caswell Academy,” The (Raleigh, NC) Star, December 1, 1808, 19. America’s Historical Papers, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, http://infoweb.newsbank.com.libproxy.uncg.edu. Butler records that the instructor for the Salem Church School was Numa F. Reid and the Margarita Seminary in the Belews Creek area was operated by Marinda Branson Moore. Moore also devised the Dixie Readers, a set of textbooks used throughout the area. Coon relates that Caswell County, to the east of Rockingham, boasted a number of classical academies and female seminaries in the antebellum era, including Caswell Academy, where future Congressman Bartlett Yancey was the teacher, Hyco Academy, Springfield Academy, Milton Female Academy, Miss Prendergast’s School, Pickard’s School, Miss Ballantine’s Seminary, Mrs. Stith’s Seminary, and Leasburg Classical School.

War, the Madison Academy was renamed Beulah Academy. Starting in 1858, the Baptist minister, Lewis H. Shook, taught there two years, closed the school during the war, and reopened it, teaching there until 1872. Having served the youth of Madison since 1820, the last teacher at this academy, which stood overlooking the Dan River and railroad tracks, was Julius M. Weatherly, in 1898-1900. Because of the prominence of the school, one of Madison’s main streets was named Academy Street.4

As part of their pride in the area’s antebellum educational legacy, Rockingham County citizens today assert that the site of the first public school for whites in the state was in the Williamsburg section in the southeastern corner of the county. Claims to this “first” are best supported by a short announcement, which appeared in the North

Carolina (Raleigh, NC) Standard on February 12, 1840, and then days later in the Greensboro (NC) Patriot on February 18, 1840, about a year after the state General

Assembly passed important legislation that for the first time meant that the state was committed to public schools. This record congratulated the ten men making up the “superintendency” of the schools for having the county surveyed, marking it off into districts eight miles long and four and a half miles wide and getting the “first free school in Rockingham county . . . into operation,” “probably the first free school commenced in the State.” Yet locals were unaware of this achievement in the mid-twentieth century, as even school officials and local historians seemed bewildered by the claim that had

4 Butler, Rockingham County, 45; Nancy Watkins, “Some Garden Sass,” Greensboro (NC) Daily News, August 14, 1929, 6; “Famous Beulah Academy in Madison Being Demolished,” Greensboro (NC)

Record, July 27, 1935, 2; Charles Rodenbough and Jean Rodenbough, Town of Madison: A Heritage to Honor, 1818-1968 (Madison, NC: Madison Sesquicentennial Commission, Inc., 1968), 17, 5,

appeared in a recent well-known textbook: “On January 20, 1840, the first public school in the state was opened in Rockingham County.” The establishment of the school was later confirmed in deeds and common school records in the State Archives, and a

historical highway marker was erected in the vicinity in 1990. Additional descriptions of the school came from the family history of George W. Garrett, whose relatives provided evidence passed down in their family that Garrett, a plantation owner near the

Rockingham/Caswell line, provided the building and was the school’s first teacher.5

These first public schools emerged in the context of North Carolina’s early efforts to provide public education, led by judge and state legislator Archibald DeBow Murphey, who has become known as “the father of public education” in the state. Murphey had several connections to Rockingham County and today a main street through downtown Madison is named for him. As a lawyer and judge, Murphey did legal work in the area and was much admired by early leaders in Madison. Having visited the area seeking better health, Murphey bought property in Rockingham County in 1807—Rockingham Springs—a site popularly known for its mineral springs treatments. As a state legislator, Murphey anchored the debate about whether the general population should be educated,

5 “Rockingham County and Common Schools,” North Carolina (Raleigh, NC) Standard, February 12, 1840; Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, eds., The History of a Southern State: North

Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954, 1963, 1973), 368; “Site of First N.C.

Public School Is Reported To Be in Rockingham County,” The Advisor, January 1959, 18-19. North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program, http://www.ncmarkers.com/Markers.aspx?MarkerId=J-94; Vance Swift, “First Public Free School,”

The State 54, no. 8 (January 1987): 14-15. The 1840 announcement reported that the ten school

supervisors were Thomas S. Gallaway, Nathan Wright, Thomas B. Wheeler, Robert W. Lawson, John L. Lesuers, Mecajah McGehee, Rawley Gallaway, E. T. Brodnax, Joel Fagg, and James Currie. The article praised these men for the “very able and zealous manner” in which they acted and gave credit to the surveyors, J. G. Wright and E. W. Hancock, for their work. In 1959, neither local historian Bettie Sue Gardner nor Rockingham County Superintendent Allan Lewis had heard of this claim, they told

to what extent, and whether the state had responsibility for implementing public schools. This conversation went on in North Carolina from its early statehood and intensified in the 1820s and 1830s. Early support came from Governor James Turner, who called for a “general diffusion of learning” that would reach “into every corner of the State.”

Legislator John Walker of Warren County later gave a novel reason for expanding education: to keep North Carolinians from moving out of the state. If they had more access to schools, they would be less likely to migrate, he argued; “facility in education” would strengthen their ties to home.6

Overall, support for public education at this time was weak, but Murphey worked to convince his fellow legislators through his report on the status of education in 1817 that the state should be concerned about “thousands of unfortunate children” and “place them in schools where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts trained to virtue.” One difficulty facing the extension of education to these students was the fact that

150,000 white children were spread all across the state at a ratio of about three pupils per square mile. As a result of the work of Murphey and others concerned about public education, however, thousands of these young people were reached in the next decades as the state assumed a role in public education. The Literary Fund was established in 1825 to help subsidize schools and the first state public school law was enacted in January 1839. Through these measures, North Carolinians laid the foundation for the expansion of education to a white population that at the time was approximately 27 percent

6 Rodenbough, Town of Madison, 5; Butler, Rockingham County, 26; “History of Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 1993, 8; Weeks, “Beginnings of the Common School System,” 1400-1401. The quotation from Governor Turner comes from his message of November 21, 1804.

illiterate, the highest rate of any state in the nation. It was a system that provided a limited state commitment to education while ensuring local control of public schools.7

The first public school law in 1839 put the question very literally to a vote in each county: “schools or no schools.” If the people voted for schools, they were agreeing not only to a tax to support them, but also to establish oversight through a group of county superintendents. These men would then direct a survey of the county and divide it into districts, identify all white school-aged children (ages five through twenty-one), find or build a suitable “school house,” and then receive $40 from state funds for every $20 levied through taxes locally. When this process had been completed, “all white children were to be admitted without payment of any tuition whatever whether they were rich or poor.” Nearly every county in the state promptly voted for schools, with Rockingham County being the first to vote in the affirmative and establish a school. The tally was 927 voting yes and 211 opposing. In only six years, every county had at least one public school, and by 1850, 2,657 common schools were operating in the state.8

7 M. C. S. Noble, A History of the Public Schools of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930), 56, 34, 46, 49; E. W. Knight, “Discussion of the January Lesson,” North

Carolina Education, February 1917, 13-14; Coon, The Beginnings of Public Education, xliv; Weeks,

“Beginnings of the Common School System,” 1404, 1415, 1423; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God

Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 455.

In its early years, monies for the Literary Fund came from a federal surplus divided among the states and from state investments in infrastructure, including dividends from navigation companies. Thomas Settle, Sr., of Rockingham County, was also a member of Murphey’s committee on education. 8 Coon, The Beginnings of Public Education, 910, xliv; Noble, A History of the Public Schools, 54;

Weeks, “Beginnings of the Common School System,” 1421-22; “History of Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, 8. Tally of the vote on the school law was reported in the Raleigh (NC) Register, August 17, 1839. Perhaps the availability of the George Garrett school house already built on his plantation and his role as the first teacher made it possible for this Rockingham County “first.”

Because the common schools system under this plan was almost entirely under local management, regular reports were not made to the state and growth was haphazard. There was no state official overseeing the system who might attempt to travel to the more than twelve hundred districts that were created in just a few years’ time. The

Rockingham County school chairman did report, however, in 1848 that the county had defined and established thirty-five school districts with a staff of thirty-nine teachers, who taught on average a term of five months. The teachers included one female, Isabella M. Harris. Although the county employed three dozen teachers in this first decade, one of the obstacles faced by common schools statewide was the lack of teachers. When Calvin Wiley became state superintendent in the 1850s, he implemented a certification plan, but these certificates were left to county school leaders to issue after administering

examinations. Teachers were approved by local committees if they were found to be of good moral character and had “sufficient qualifications for teaching.” These

qualifications, however, were not specified by the state, and certificates were only good in the county of issuance. Still, access to education grew among whites where their community leaders were committed to providing it. Over the decade from 1840-1850, the white population of North Carolina grew by about 12 percent. During that time the number of students in all the common schools increased about 500 percent, from 19,483 to more than 100,000, with the average school term lasting about four months. By 1859, the rate of illiteracy among whites in North Carolina was down to 11 percent.9

9 Noble, A History of the Public Schools, 85, 125; Butler, Rockingham County, 45; “History of Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, 9; Weeks, “Beginnings of the Common School System,” 1423, 1425, 1434-35; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 455. Weeks

While free public schooling spread for white children, even for some from poorer families in the twenty years before the Civil War, teaching African Americans to read and write was prohibited by law in nearly every Southern state. In North Carolina, an 1831 statute made the prohibition clear: “That any free person, who shall hereafter teach or attempt to teach, any slave within this State to read or write, the use of figures excepted, or shall give or sell to such slave or slaves any books or pamphlets, shall be liable to indictment.” Whites who violated this law could be fined between $100 and $200 or imprisoned, while free persons of color who attempted to teach slaves would be

imprisoned, fined, or “whipped . . . not exceeding thirty-nine lashes.” A slave who taught other slaves would receive the thirty-nine lashes “on his or her bare back.” Despite petitions from the Society of Friends to repeal these laws and, in fact, encourage the education of slaves, schooling for blacks in North Carolina remained, as Heather A.