Scout’s Memory Book is Now Online at DigitalNC

Online at DigitalNC

1925 Boy Scouts Memory Book

Last Friday I received in the mail a donation of a photo album from 1925 containing perhaps fifty photographs of Boy Scouts and the Stuckey family in Wilson, NC.  The High Point Museum originally received the memory book from the owner and thought that it should be in Wilson. So we are very grateful that they sent us this unique treasure.

Some of the subjects of the photographs include a Confederate veteran reunion, Camp Wilson, Charleston, SC, Camp Leach (doesn’t sound fun) in Beaufort County, NC, the Appalachians, and Bath, NC. I have digitized a few pages but it is so large I am going to take it to UNC Chapel Hill on Thursday to get it completely digitized and put up on Digital NC.

Stantonsburg, NC High School circa. 1920’s

A man named Jeff Owens just dropped off these three pictures of classes at Stantonsburg High School.  The older kids look like the 1920’s especially with the short hair on women and the mink stole. Only one image looks like high school age but he didn’t have any info on them except to say that everyone who knew anything about them in his family are dead.  Also, that his aunt is in the pictures, but I forgot to ask her name.

So if anyone can ID any of the students in the pictures, please let us know.

1926 Winoca, Yearbook of Wilson High School

1926 girls basketball team won every regular season game and defeated Ayden 53-0

One of the well designed pages from the yearbook. Girls almost universally had their hair cut short and many wore furs. The boys used buckets of pomade, and I’m sure it was Dapper Dan brand.

Ella Rachel Vick is my favorite student in the yearbook. She’s got old fashioned curls, her nickname is “Vanilla”, her quote is about how she will not dance, and she won the Carolina Laundry Medal in 1925.

One artifact of the Harper family collection was a 1926 Wilson High School Yearbook.  This yearbook is a beautiful creation: the pictures are sharp, the design is elegant, reflecting the dominant art deco style of the period, and it does an exceptional job of recording the life and times at the high school in 1926.  But this was an economically strong period in US history and the  money to make such a beautiful yearbook would not be available to a public school almost twenty years later during the war years and the quality of the yearbooks during that period reflects this.  The economy is also mirrored in the clothes that the students wore in their photographs which couldn’t be more obvious when you quickly notice that every other girl is wearing what looks to be a mink stole, which is about the fanciest accessory ever worn in a school picture. There’s a school picture of me wearing Mork suspenders, which is about the least fancy thing ever worn in a school picture (for people who are wee babes or out of the late 1970’s to early 1980’s tv loop, Mork was and alien played by Robin Williams on a show called Mork and Mindy, which oddly, was a spinoff from Happy Days).

This yearbook was the property of Miriam Brown an English Teacher at the school, who was also a granddaughter of Luby Alexander Harper.

This would be the last year that Wilson High School would go by that name, for the next year it would be renamed Charles L. Coon High School after the late principal and superintendent.

Sallie Barbour School and C.H. Darden High School, Two Pioneering African American Schools in Wilson, NC

C.H. Darden High School opened in 1923 and was built using mainly African American contractors and was Wilson’s first high school for African Americans.

Sallie Barbour School was built in 1893 with money from Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck & Co.

 After scanning the photograph collection of the 1920s era Wilson County schools , I noticed that two pictures were left out of the collection of but were included in the  1924 Public Schools of Wilson County report.  These photographs were of the Sallie Barbour School and the Wilson Colored High School (Later Darden High School).  Both schools were for African American students.  The Sallie Barbour School, also called the Wilson Colored Graded School, was originally built in 1898 and was for children until they were 13 years old.  Julius Rosenwald, president of the Sears Roebuck & Co.  built 5,000 schools for African Americans throughout the rural south and there were 16 Rosenwald Schools in Wilson County with the Sallie Barbour School being one of them.

 However, after the seventh grade there was no high school to attend for African American youth in Wilson County, so those that could afford it or were well connected sent their children to boarding schools like the one that Shaw University operated in Raleigh.  Those who could not pay to go to boarding school had to end their schooling and therefore had even more finite prospects in the already limited and hostile environment of the Jim Crow south.  In my last blog post I mentioned the incident where Charles L. Coon slapped an African American teacher named Mrs. Norwell and the community took their children out of the public schools.  After the incident the African American community stated that they would not put their children back into the school system unless a high school was built for them.  Wilson County’s school board finally agreed and bought land on Carroll Street for the building of a high school.  Originally called the Wilson Colored High School it opened in 1924, and in 1939 it was renamed Darden in memory of Charles H. Darden, a former slave who became a funeral home owner and one Wilson’s most prominent African American leaders and proponents of education.

Wilson County Schools 1914-1924

Johnson’s School– One of the many one-room school houses that would be abolished by consolidation.

C. L. Coon High school, one of the four high schools build with bond money. Originally, when it opened in 1923 it was name Wilson High School, but after C. L. Coon’s death in 1927 from throat cancer it was renamed for him.

As a consequence of trying to discern the photographer(s) of a collection of photographs of every school in Wilson County in the 1920’s and the reasoning behind why someone made such a complete photographic record, I fortuitously came upon a detailed report on the Wilson County school system during the same period with copies of the same photographs in the report.

In 1924 the Wilson County Board of Education published a report on the progress of the preceding ten years of the educational system in Wilson County entitled, The Public Schools of Wilson County.  If the stats were accurate it looked like the educational system was doing extraordinarily well under the dynamic leadership of the school superintendent Charles L. Coon, who had been superintendent since 1907.  The stats show exponential increases in all areas from the value of school property ($128,000 in 1913 to $1,482,330 in 1924) to an increase in enrollment by 68% and an increase in attendance by 82%.  Also, four new high schools were built during the period and the county’s first school buses were implemented carrying 2,200 children daily.

All of these achievements would be considered remarkable in any decade.  But the fact that they were achieved in the early 1900’s in a mostly rural, agricultural county makes it all the more impressive.  The driving force behind the positive changes was Coon’s method of consolidating schools, creating school transportation, implementing a county-wide school tax, issuing bonds for school construction, implementing strict discipline for students and teachers and being very selective in hiring the very best teachers available while paying them the highest salaries in the state.  All of these policies together brought about the blooming of education in Wilson County.

However, not all was rosey. African American teacher’s pay, at $383.00, was still strikingly lower than the white teacher’s pay, $1,031.00, even though it had been increased 100 percent in the preceding ten years.  This is evidence of the long road that was yet to be travelled to true universal education for all students, especially since Charles L. Coon was the leading advocate in North Carolina for equal education for African American children, a stance that made him not a few enemies in some southern states.  (Contrarily, Charles Coon had caused an uproar in the African American community in Wilson County after he slapped a black teacher when she argued with him about the performance of her students.  The enraged black community took their children out of the county schools for a period of time.  So Charles, despite his work for equality, still exhibited some decidedly non-modern traits.)

Statistics published in the Public Schools of Wilson County report

 

Some of Coon’s tough policies had their detractors, especially the strict requirements for teachers written into their contracts, which many of the newspapers in North Carolina jumped on and ridiculed as absurd once they got wind of it.

Here is an extract of the contract and it is a wee bit puritanical:

I will take a vital interest in church and Sunday School work and other community activities; that I will not entertain company until late hours at night and thus render my school work next day inefficient; that I will not attend sorry moving picture and vaudeville shows; that I will not fall in love or become familiar with high school pupils; that I will not attend card and dancing parties; that I will not fail to use good sense and discretion in the company I keep; that I will use the best endeavors during the year to improve my work as a teacher; and that I will do nothing to bring disrepute on the home in which I live or to cause right thinking people to speak disparagingly of me and of my work (Willard, 1966).

But the overall great success of the policies that Coon had introduced caused other counties in North Carolina to adopt some of his methodologies, especially in the areas of school consolidation and school transportation.

Now all of the pictures produced for this report  can be found on our Flickr page.  Many of the images are of the one room school houses that were abolished by Charles L. Coon in his school consolidation, so ironically some of the only photographic records of these historic buildings are from his survey for the The Public Schools of Wilson County report.

Also, I never found out who the photographers were.

Sources

Willard, George-Anne (1968). Charles Lee Coon: North Carolina Crusader for Social Justice.  Unpublished Master’s thesis.  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Public Schools of Wilson County (1924).