Doors to the Past

From the year 1800 up to the time the public school system went into 
effect near the close of the Civil War, it seems that some kind of pay or 
subscription school was conducted in the neighborhood every year. The 
lengths of the terms varied according to conditions that prevailed in the 
public mind or the ability to pay the cost. The names of the teachers and 
the places where they taught are fairly well preserved in the neighborhood 
tradition, but the exact order in which they were taught is uncertain. No 
record of those schools taught under private neighborhood contracts has 
been preserved. 
 
At an early date John McGinnis taught several terms at different places in 
the neighborhood. In 1858 he was teaching in Spice Flat Cottage, which had 
then been abandoned as a residence. 
 
Not many years later, perhaps in the early forties, Robert Stewart, 
formerly of Bath County, moved to the neighborhood and taught several 
terms in the community school building on the south side of the present 
paved road near Ona. 
 
Following Mr. Stewart, Porter Wallace of Botetourte County taught for 
several years in the same building. He was an excellent teacher, a refined 
gentleman after the type of that day, and was highly esteemed by all 
classes of society. He was living in the neighborhood and teaching in 
1852. Not a few of the boys of that day were named Porter W. in honor of 
the esteemed teacher. 
 
During that period of education in this section, and especially during Mr. 
Wallace's years of service as teacher, so many pupils attended school and 
so many branches of study were taught that it became necessary to have 
some kind of an assistant in order to get through with the daily program 
of recitations. To take care of that situation, as well as to reduce the 
costs of conducting the school and afford some pupil free tuition, a sort 
of monitorial system was adopted, not unlike the Lancaster-Bell system so 
widely heralded at an early date in New England schools. The monitor 
system and the modern social center idea were then in vogue in this 
section, without getting the broad advertisement given to the same 
practices farther north. Mr. C. A, Rece, now in his eighty-fourth year, a 
resident of Huntington, says he was taught to read by Elizabeth Yates, 
daughter of William P. Yates, who was the monitor assistant in Porter 
Wallace's school near Ona. 

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Templates in Time