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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