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