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Autograph letter addressed to Mr. Alvin Crowley of Rutland Vermont discussing the Virginia scene, illiteracy, teaching, attitudes regarding slavery, etc.
Guyandotte, Virginia, December 21, 1836. 12” x 7.5”, 4 pp. CONDITION: Very good, some foxing, some tears at folds affecting individual letters, rear page with tear along margins affecting text at end of letter. A letter from a Vermont-born schoolteacher in present-day West Virginia describing the deplorable state of education in the region, where illiteracy was pervasive, despite the wealth of the state. Tyrrell, a former “agent and overseer of the stage line and plantation” in Cabell County had by the first of August, 1836, as he reports, “set up school…about one mile from” Guyandotte “where…wages amount to about thirty dollars per month.” He observes that “the business of teaching is very good” in Cabell County, where at the time there were “several places…where teachers are wanted but cannot be found[,] they have so few good teachers here that a good teacher could command any price he wished.” But teaching in a village like Guyandotte is rough going, as “great boys and girls from eighteen to twenty years old come to school and read their a b abs and o b obs and u b ubs but…cannot spell [t]heir names this would would look strange in our country, but here it is nothing uncommon.” To further illustrate the problem of local illiteracy, Tyrrell relates that during a “presidential election, on the morning of the 7th Nov…people gathered in throngs at the place of election…each man’s ticket was obliged to have its bearer’s name on the back of it this caused…some trouble for a majority of them could not write their name and were as unable to spell as to write…this you would suppose a rather large story but…this is a true statement of the people of Guyandotte and vicinity.” When grasping for an explanation as to why the inhabitants of Guyandotte remained illiterate despite residing in of “one of the oldest states in the union and nearly the richest,” Tyrrell suggests that their ignorance “is the effects of slavery, for it has been a principle inculcated by the slave dealers that the more[?] ignorance the more[?] peace but these opinions are becoming expunged in the northern part of the state where the effects of freedom shine more conspicuously.” Tyrrell anticipated teaching in Guyandotte “till spring but how much longer…I cannot tell…if business remains good I probably shall stay all summer.” Guyandotte was first settled by veterans from the Revolutionary War. At the time this letter was written, the county’s “strategic location adjacent to the Ohio River near southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky” was attractive to settlers because of its “cheap, arable land, plentiful timber, and…navigable waterways; slaveholders increasingly settled in the county throughout the early to mid-1800s…By the mid-1800s, the county’s two main towns, Guyandotte and Barboursville, were vibrant villages. By the early 1830s, Guyandotte was hosting many river travelers as well as benefiting from the construction of a road which connected it with the James River and Kanawha Turnpike at Barboursville, the county seat…the road linked the county’s agrarian and commercial economies to the regional and world markets, leading to increasing settlement in or adjacent to the villages throughout the mid-1800s” (Fain). Guyandotte itself “boasted 40 homes, five stores, a non-denominational church, a primary school, and a gristmill said to be the largest between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh” (Casto). The high demand for “good teachers” in Guyandotte that Tyrell mentions shortly preceded the opening of Marshall Academy, a teacher’s college founded in Guyandotte in 1837/38. Genealogical sources report that William S. Tyrrell was born in either Andover or Ludlow, Vermont, at the end of August 1813, and died in Stafford, Kansas, in early August 1885. According to an obituary published in the Stafford Herald, Tyrrell worked most of his life as a physician, having “graduated from an Ohio medical college in 1836, when he commenced practicing.” However, the date of the present letter suggests that Tyrrell most likely attended medical school after leaving his teaching post in Guyandotte in 1837 and migrating to nearby Ohio. REFERENCES: Fain, Cicero. “Early Black Migration and the Post-emancipation Black Community in Cabell County, West Virginia, 1865-1871,” West Virginia History A Journal of Regional Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2011): p. 30; Casto, James E. “Guyandotte," The West Virginia Encyclopedia online; Stafford Herald, Kansas, August 6, 1885; “William S. Tyrell” at Ancestry online.
Item #8863
Price: $475.00
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