Jennie Smedley, Outstanding Teacher

In 1898 the one-room Tryon Public School welcomed a remarkable new teacher, Miss Jane A. Smedley. Her personal influence brought about the voters’ approval of a bond issued to construct the first graded school building in Polk County. Smedley’s leadership in The Lanier Club led to its 1905 construction of the picturesque village library and community meeting center that made Tryon noteworthy.

Jennie grew up on a farm near Weymouth, Ohio in the old Connecticut Western Reserve settled mostly by settlers from rural New England.

Congregational church at Weymouth, Ohio where Smedley heard famous abolitionist Garrison preach on Emancipation.

They were as keen about educating girls as they were for boys. She attended Weymouth one-room school and its Congregational church, where fiery William Lloyd Garrison was invited to preach his controversial views about Immediate Emancipation. At 18 she enrolled at nearby Oberlin College, one of the nation’s earliest co-educational institutions, and the first to enroll Black men and women. The town’s Patterson’s Corner grocery was owned by African-Americans. Jennie studied along with Mary Jane Patterson (the first American Black woman to achieve a Bachelor of Arts degree). Her father Henry, bricklayer and plasterer, resettled his free Black family from Raleigh to Oberlin in 1852. Abolitionism was strong in that area; four of Patterson’s children graduated from its college and all became teachers.

Mary Patterson from Raleigh,
North Carolina. Jennie’s black classmate at Oberlin College

one-room school at Weymouth circa 1860
Weymouth Preservation Society

Jennie’s aunts Celestia and Electa Smedley from Weymouth were early Oberlin graduates. Both her older sisters Lucy and Harriet followed in their footsteps to attend, then before the Civil War headed for rural Louisiana. In 1860 Lucy L. Smedley was living in rural East Baton Rouge parish, with sister Harriet who had married Sidney Blanchard, a native of Vermont. Next door were Solomon and Rachael Montgomery, free Blacks who owned their own little farm. (The remote Stony Point locale was unusual indeed, on Comite River near a sawmill. Blanchard went bankrupt, but Solomon Montgomery became postmaster during Reconstruction.) Unmarried sister Lucy was still teaching down there, all the while Jennie lived in Tryon.

Atlanta, Georgia academy where Miss Smedley
lived and taught

After graduating from Oberlin in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, Jennie Smedley returned to Weymouth. She taught in her old village school. About 1870 she left for Minnesota where she taught in the growing town LeSueur. By 1880 her ambition took her out to California, where she taught in a graded school at Oakland by San Francisco Bay. Throughout her life Smedley was eager to experience new places. During summers she traveled widely. She’d take new jobs where she could be useful. In 1894 she joined the faculty of private Washington Seminary in downtown Atlanta, a college preparatory academy for girls. When Episcopalians in Wisconsin established a first-rate girl’s academy at Fond du Lac, Jennie joined its faculty as their teacher of history.

Natural sunlight illuminating a late 19th century classroom.
Tryon’s school, similarly, had no electricity during Smedley’s era.

Miss Frances Wright, also from New England, was the energetic catalyst for gathering together a new group of well-educated women in 1898 at Tryon. That was a notable year in North Carolina history when the Wilmington Massacre took place, a brutal coup d’etat by white supremacists that shocked the nation. Mary LeDuc, a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan College, Tryon postmaster and in 1890 a founder of the Lanier Club for women, wrote her kin in Minnesota that terrified blacks were streaming into Tryon. Wright revived Tryon’s woman’s club moribund for six years, as its president. She initiated monthly programs addressing serious societal issues, in addition to the literary and worldly topics of Lanier’s formative years.

vintage elocution book

ad for device used to teach spelling

Not all of Smedley’s programs at Lanier Club were explicitly about social issues. In 1901 she delivered her perspectives about the public life of Queen Victoria, who reigned over the British Empire wisely during the era when it became the world’s most powerful. In 1902 Jennie’s program was about France, another powerful world empire with far-flung diversity. Rand’s talk that year was about social settlement work, while Wright’s discomforting paper about child labor in America was titled “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” Smedley and Wright later that year backed off a bit, to present a more pleasant November program about the charms of the old Spanish missions in California. Miss Smedley concluded Lanier’s 1903 year with her New Year’s Eve program delivering her essay about Alaska.

1890s watercolor depicting Mission Dolores,
visited by Jennie Smedley when she taught in California

There can be no doubt Smedley’s talks to the woman’s club mirrored topics she was teaching at Tryon School. In 1904 her talk at Lanier was titled “Power of Personal Influence” and such skills were coached in American schools during that era. Elocution, public speaking and social skills were considered the mission of paid teachers to inculcate. Discipline and exercises that might embarrass or dismay some pupils today were quite the norm. Margaret Morley, nationally-known author on biology and active member at Lanier Club who was twenty years younger, became Jennie’s friend. In 1899 Morley published Little Wanderers, a fascinating book for young people about botany which she illustrated expertly herself. Jennie surely used it for her Tryon class work; Morley’s prescient observations in it about environmental conservation and nature appreciation were progressive indeed for that era. Their collaborative influence led to Tryon Township becoming the first in North Carolina to employ a professional forester and fire-fighter full-time. Later, Tryon Garden Club worked to save Pearson’s Falls Glen as the nation’s first preserve for purpose of maintaining permanent botanical diversity.

Tryon author Morley’s botany book, with her commentary advocating conservation of North Carolina’s valuable forests.

In 1903 Polk County News reports Jennie Smedley was assistant principal of Tryon School, reporting to the male principal and superintendent of its school district. With Emma S. McFarland (1884 – 1975), a young teacher there native to Polk, in August she represented Tryon at the county’s summer institute for educators. In 1904 when spring term concluded, Jennie headed for St. Louis to experience its memorable World’s Fair. That year Town voters approved a bond issue to build a fine new building for Tryon Graded School, the county’s first of brick and its first school designed to “city” and national professional standards of the era. It opened in 1906 on Trade Street, the pride of the village; later it was converted to a small hotel and today it serves as Tryon Town Hall.

Education building at 1904 World’s Fair. Model classes demonstrated best pedagogy from primary through college level, courses in elocution and in foreign languages.