Lucy Chase, December 24, 1863

Norfolk, Va., Dec. 24th, 1863.

We shall continue our school through the holidays. A prospect of rest and vacation wearies us.

My sister went to Newbern for a day or two, a week or so ago. She had, for a few weeks, had the entire superintendence of a school of four hundred children. Small children, too, and raw. It was the reception school of the city. Thirty or forty new scholars came every day. A school that only one with a gift could control, and only one with a body could bear upon her shoulders. It was the school in which we had taught through the summer, giving our extra time to the refugees and to the farms.

Difficulties and delays have blocked the path-way to our own special family schoolhouse; but now we have one, the doors are open; and by New Year's, we shall have a school-house of our own. At present, we are teaching in a church.

Three hundred more refugees came in on Tuesday; seventy wagon “loads” on Saturday; and one hundred and twenty “loads" a day or two ago. The Doctor drops them upon his farms now, that the city may no longer be over burdened.

Lucy Chase.

SOURCE: New-England Educational Commission for Freedmen, Extracts from Letters of Teachers and Superintendents of the New-England Educational Commission for Freedmen, Fourth Series, January 1, 1864, p. 12