History

In Her Own Words

It is a wonderful thing to have been associated with a good school for fifty years in this great democratic society of ours. It is also a wonderful thing to have been a teacher for sixty years. I began teaching in 1896, the year I graduated at Vassar College. I look back over these sixty years with great satisfaction and great happiness.

My own life has coincided in years with the great modern world, for I was born in May, 1873, and all historians are agreed that there have been more changes in the world since 1870 than there were in the world up to 1870. I was 83 years old on May 19th of this year, and I have seen all these changes in the world. I have seen the coming of the telephone, the automobile, the radio, the aeroplane, the moving picture, and television.

Although we have all the devices of science, I do not think we have changed very much as people. I still think that the subjects we are taught have not changed. I still think that learning is a rigorous process and that it always will be. I believe the education that I had as a child is the best kind of education—one of happiness, one of precision, one of training the mind. I think there will never be another kind.

My father became an invalid when I was twelve years old. He was then 46 years old. He had tuberculosis of the lungs and cirrhosis of the liver. He had been in the Civil War for four years. During the last years of the war he was a prisoner of war in Libbey Prison in Richmond, Virginia, for nine months. The treatment of the prisoners there was pretty dreadful and it was there that he started his poor health.

We had come to live in Washington in May, 1887, from Martinsburg, West Virginia. I could never forget my years spent in the Washington Central High School. There I met the friends who have remained the friends of a lifetime. My years in the High School are among the loveliest of my life, and I remember them with great devotion.

Then I went off to Vassar. I received the first scholarship to be given by the alumnae there. The so-called scholarship was not a scholarship but a loan of $200 a year without interest. I borrowed $800 in the four years. We were extremely poor. My mother began keeping boarders when we moved to Washington, and the family could give me but little money. The board and tuition at college was $400 a year, including laundry. I had $200 a year from the Vassar College Washington Branch loan, $100 from an uncle, and $100 which my brother gave me.

When I graduated from Vassar in June, 1896, I expected to teach in the Washington public schools. But, the National Park Seminary at Forest Glen, Maryland, was in search of a teacher of history, and I took that position. It carried with it an income of $150 a year and room and board. I roomed and slept in a bed with a young teacher of music from Charleston, South Carolina, and we laughed off the ignoble position we were in. We did not have a closet for our clothes, nor a bureau nor a chest of drawers, and we had only one dormer window in our tiny room. We kept our clothes in suitcases under the bed. We had a good time with the staff and enjoyed the foolishness of the year.

I believe the education that I had as a child is the best kind of education—one of happiness, one of precision, one of training the mind. I think there will never be another kind.

The next year I began a nine-year stretch of good work in history at the Sidwell Friends’ Select School.

At the end of this period I opened our school—a college preparatory school for girls—because at the end of ten years of teaching I was making only $950 a year, which was a regulation salary for a teacher. In the meantime, my sister had developed tuberculosis and I had to help take care of her.

I had paid back the money I had borrowed for my four years of college, and I was able to borrow $6000 with which to start the new school.

With this $6000 we started off on 19th Street near Dupont Circle with a day school of fifteen and a resident school of thirteen. We were fortunate in our teaching staff from the very start. We were able to engage teachers who had had experience, who were married women, and who wished to teach only two periods a day. In this way our expenses were held in check. We had a fine group of teachers and the school has had a fine academic basis from the very beginning. It has never made any personal profits as I have always thought that school should be a spiritual place—as much so as a church is—and that it should not make any personal profits.

Lucy Madeira Wing
An Autobiography, May 1956