This Month in Rockingham County History: February - 1840

   In February 1840, it was announced that the first public school in the state had been opened in Rockingham County. Claims to this “first” are best supported by a short announcement which appeared in the North Carolina Standard (Raleigh, NC) on February 12, 1840, and then days later in the Greensborough (NC) Patriot on February 18, 1840, about a year after the NC 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.”  The 1840 announcements 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.

   Yet many locals have remained unaware of Rockingham County’s achievement as the first in the state to open a public school. In the 1950s, a well-known textbook included the statement, “On January 20, 1840, the first public school in the state was opened in Rockingham County.” In 1959, however, neither local historian Bettie Sue Gardner nor Rockingham County School Superintendent Allan Lewis had heard of this claim, they told a local publication, The Advisor, but both were enthusiastic about identifying the location of the school.

   The establishment of the school in the Williamsburg section in the southeastern corner of the county was later supported in deeds and common school records in the State Archives, and a historical highway marker was erected in the vicinity in 1990.  Additional possible descriptions of the school came from a family narrative that claimed George W. Garrett, a plantation owner near the Rockingham/Caswell line, provided the building and was the school’s first teacher, but this has not been otherwise confirmed.

   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 eligible 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 apparently being the first to vote in the affirmative and establish a school. The Rockingham tally was 927 voting yes and 211 opposing. In only six years, every NC county had at least one public school, and by 1850, 2,657 common schools were operating in the state. In 1848, the school chairman reported that Rockingham County had been divided into thirty-five school districts, employed thirty-nine teachers, and operated school houses on average five months out of the year.
References
“Rockingham County and Common Schools,” North Carolina (Raleigh, NC) Standard, February 12, 1840; Greensborough (NC) Patriot, February 18, 1840, 3, UNC Greensboro Digital Collections, http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/GSOPatriot/id/5911; 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; Charles L. Coon, The Beginnings of Public Education in North Carolina: A Documentary History, 1790-1840, Volume I (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1908), 910, xliv, Documenting the American South, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/coon976/menu.html; M. C. S. Noble, A History of the Public Schools of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930), 54; 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), 1421-22; “History of Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, (1993), 8; Lindley S. Butler, Rockingham County: A Brief History (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1982), 45. Tally of the vote on the school law was reported in the Raleigh (NC) Register, August 17, 1839. 

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