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Norfolk Highlights 1584 - 1881
By George Holbert Tucker
Chapter 53
Education in Old Norfolk
Although a lot of the east side of "the street that leadeth into
the woods," that later became Church Street and is now St. Paul's
Boulevard, was provided for a schoolhouse by the Lower Norfolk County
authorities when Norfolk was laid out in 1680-81, there was no school
building on the property until around 1761.
In the intervening eighty years there were four ways a child could
learn his "three R's" in the borough.
Well-to-do citizens provided private tutors for their children; a parish
school for boys was conducted off and on by the ministers or parish
clerks of Elizabeth River Parish; an enterprising lad could be apprenticed
to a merchant to learn arithmetic, spelling, bookkeeping and how to
write a legible hand from a senior mercantile clerk; or a girl could
obtain the rudiments of an education, "needlework, and marking
on a sampler" by attending what was then known as a "Dame's
School," usually operated in their own homes by literate but impecunious
widows or spinsters.
The first step toward organized public education in the borough was
taken in 1728, when Samuel Boush I and Thomas Newton, acting as trustees
for the Norfolk County Court for unsold public lands in the town, conveyed
half of the lot originally set aside in 1680-81 for a school to Samuel
Boush II, Nathaniel Newton, and Samuel Smith who agreed to erect a schoolhouse
on the property and to employ a master. As nothing was done, however,
the Virginia General Assembly took matters into its hands in 1752 and
authorized the Norfolk County Court and the Norfolk Borough Council
jointly to hire a schoolmaster and establish a Grammar School on the
still vacant schoolhouse lot.
As this produced no action, the Assembly passed a new act in 1762,
vesting the sole control of the proposed Grammar School in the borough
council. This act, passed in March 1762, states, " . . . a schoolhouse
hath been built on the said lot . . ." As far as can be determined
now, this was the first schoolhouse erected for that purpose in the
borough. This was the beginning of the present Norfolk Academy.
As this building presumably was destroyed at the beginning of the Revolutionary
War when Norfolk was burned by the British and Virginia forces, the
aldermen and common council of the borough appointed commissioners on
December 6, 1785, to " . . . agree with some person or persons
to rebuild the free school . . ." The rebuilt school, known for
the first time as the "Norfolk Academy" and headed by the
Reverend Walker Maury, opened in 1786, at which time it ceased to be
a free school, a tuition fee being charged.
Its curriculum consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, bookkeeping,
English grammar, geography and the use of the globes, and Latin, Greek,
and French. Pupils of the first class were distinguished by a broad
black ribbon thrown over the right shoulder and under the left, while
those in the lower grades wore a blue ribbon in the buttonholes of their
coats.
The second school building on Church Street opposite St. Paul's Episcopal
Church was used until the opening of the Old Norfolk Academy building
on Bank Street in 1841, with John P. Scott, a fiery-tempered Irishman
as headmaster. Tradition says that when the weather was warm and the
boys were obstreperous, Scott would swoop down on the culprits and toss
them out of the nearest window.
Besides the Academy there were many other privately operated schools
in Norfolk during the early Nineteenth Century, notably the Lancastrian
School (1815-1856), one of the many monitor-operated, non-secterian
institutions of its kind in the United States, established by Joseph
Lancaster (1788-1838), an English educator and a member of the Society
of Friends.
All of these privately owned Norfolk schools operated on a tuition
basis, however, making it difficult for the average poor child to obtain
even the rudiments of an education.
Finally, this condition was changed in 1850, when Norfolk by an act
of the Virginia Assembly was authorized to establish a free public school
system. It was not until 1858, however, that Norfolk's first four public
schools for any white person between the ages of six and twenty-one
were opened, with Thomas C. Tabb (1803-1873) as the city's first public
school superintendent.
 Chapter
54
Norfolk's Farewell to a Hero
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