52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 15 – April 8 – 14, 2024
School Days
As a former teacher, school principal, and school board member, I was particularly interested in this prompt for the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge that I have been participating in since the beginning of 2024. My mother instilled the love for, and the reality of the privilege of education, in our family from a young age. Indeed, she was the salutatorian of a large suburban high school in northeastern Pennsylvania in 1943, the year she graduated. She was lucky to have been born in 1926 and attended school during that time. It was not always the case in her family, my father’s family, or in most families. Upon reviewing my research about my maternal family, I realized that I wanted to know more about my grandmother’s education in the early years of the 20th century.
For more than a century formal education, public and private, has been a predominant part of our children’s and teenager’s lives but it wasn’t always so. For many boys, but especially for girls who had completed the eighth grade their education ended there. Such was the case for my grandmother.
In my research about education in the first decade of the 20th century, I discovered that children began their education at varying ages. However, public schools were becoming more widespread, and states started requiring school attendance. In the early 1900s, very few students advanced beyond grade school to grammar school and on to high school. Many grammar schools in 1915 faced challenges related to social class disparities. Only 11% of children aged fourteen to seventeen were enrolled in high school, and even fewer graduated.
In the United States by 1900, thirty-four states had compulsory school laws, not surprisingly only four were in the South. Thirty states with compulsory schooling laws required attendance until age 14, or higher. As a result, by 1910, 72% of American children attended school. Half the nation’s children attended one-room schools. By 1920 all states mandated that students aged 8 to 14 years old attend school for part of the year. In rural areas, the school year was somewhat shorter because young people were still needed to work on farms. So, while there was no fixed age for starting school, the trend was toward earlier education during this period.
My maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Olive Harris Lord, was born June 4, 1904, the third of four children in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Annie Charity White, an immigrant from Yorkshire, England who had migrated to the United States in 1887 when she was a child, and William H. Harris. She lived, attended school, worked, and married in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania.
The first school information that I found regarding her formal education was from a newspaper article about a promotion list of students on June 10, 1915, from Grammar D to Grammer C, Grammar School A being the highest level before promotion to high school, at the East End Grammar School in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. By June 6, 1915, my grandmother was eleven years old. There were 24 girls and 13 boys who were promoted from Sophia M. Ferry’s classroom to the next level. Only the most basic grammar and mathematical skills were taught. I suspect that the reason there were more girls than boys was that a large part of Wilkes-Barre’s population were coal miners, and the boys following into their father’s occupation of miners, were often working as “breaker boys” in the collieries
and coal breakers by that age. Somehow, most probably through some sort of dispensation regarding the fact they needed to help provide for their large families, they were able to circumvent the compulsory age requirements.
My grandmother’s school was not a one-room schoolhouse as she lived in a more populated, non-rural area. Her school was just several blocks from her working-class neighborhood.
In a June 15, 1916 newspaper article, I found my grandmother’s name among the promoted students from Grammar C to Grammar B. There were 29 girls among the promoted students and just nine boys. It was the last information that I found regarding her formal school. I am left to surmise that she finished her education at the age of twelve. However, in the 1940 U.S. Federal Census, she was reported on the form by the census enumerator as having completed two years of high school. If that is indeed the case, she would have left school when she was approximately fourteen or fifteen years old.
The next source that I found containing my grandmother’s information was the 1920 U.S. Federal Census for Wilkes-Barre City dated January 5, 1920. She was fifteen years old, and her occupation is recorded as a “searcher” working in a lace mill. I do not know what the position of “searcher” was in a lace mill, but I do know that there were many positions available in the thriving textile and lace mills of northeastern Pennsylvania. One lace mill that I found near her home was Wilkes-Barre Lace Manufacturing Co. on Courtright Avenue and Darling Street in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. This lace mill was once a renowned producer of lace curtains and tablecloths. It also made its yarn, and by the end of the 19th century, it had earned the distinction of being the largest producer of lace products in the world. At its peak, the plant employed around 1400 workers, primarily women, and produced approximately 55,000 pairs of curtains per week.
In addition to the Wilkes-Barre Lace Manufacturing Co. there also existed the Wyoming Valley Lace Mills on East Union Street, the Doran Lace Co., and the Hess and Goldsmith Co.
I am not sure which lace mill my grandmother worked for as she never spoke about her life as a teenager. What I do know is that she worked in a lace mill in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in the years 1920, and 1921, and she must have ended her formal education in 1916. I also learned that in 1923 she was a “stamper” working at Penn Tobacco Co. in Wilkes-Barre, again their workforce was approximately two-thirds female.
The sad, yet, often common, takeaway from my research about Elizabeth O. Harris Lord is that I never asked her about her life or history spent as a young woman, nor did she ever speak about them. Unfortunately, I never asked my mother, either. I do know that she must
have instilled the Importance of education and the love of learning in my mother, Lorraine, otherwise, she would not have risen to achieve the honor of salutatorian of her high school class in Kingston, Pennsylvania in 1943. Her son, James, also graduated from high school and went on the join the U.S. Navy where he received his formal training then and served in the Korean War. Perhaps she lamented the fact that she never attended high school as both of her children were graduates.
My grandmother married Clarence W. Lord, my maternal grandfather, in April of 1925 and never worked outside of the home after that. She died on June 15, 1965, in Wilkes-Barre, she had just turned 60 years old.
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