“A Good School House, Well Fitted Up”: The 1867 Federal Letter That Documents Wheeling’s Colored Public School
Updated: Sep 17
On the evening of May 2, 1867, approximately 150 Black men and women gathered for prayer at Wheeling’s “Colored Church.”
The congregation was meeting in an extraordinary place: the old City Hall inside the Market House. City authorities had permitted Wheeling’s Black residents to use the large public hall for religious gatherings without paying rent since statehood in 1863.
The congregation had received no advance notice that important visitors were coming. Nevertheless, that evening’s regular prayer meeting became a public gathering attended by senior representatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
General Charles H. Howard, assistant commissioner of the Bureau; the Reverend John Kimball, superintendent of schools and marriages; and Colonel Raymond of Howard’s staff had arrived in Wheeling. They came to address the city’s Black residents about education, employment, savings, citizenship, and the larger work of Reconstruction.
The Wheeling Intelligencer reported the event the following morning.
Just two days earlier, a federal education report had described another remarkable Wheeling institution: the public school established for colored children in 1866.
Read together, the federal letter and the local newspaper account preserve an exceptional picture of Black Wheeling immediately after the Civil War. One document takes us inside the schoolhouse. The other places us among the congregation gathered in the Market House.
Together, they document a community building institutions, pursuing education, and claiming a place in the public life of the city.
A federal report praises Wheeling’s school
The first account is contained in a letter dated May 1, 1867, now preserved through the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal.
The letter reported educational conditions during April and described a five-day journey through West Virginia. Federal representatives visited Harpers Ferry, Charleston, Martinsburg, and Wheeling, meeting Black residents and examining the schools available to them.
At Harpers Ferry, a procession with a flag, torches, fife, and drum preceded an enthusiastic meeting about education. Efforts were underway to create a normal school for teacher training and perhaps a college.
At Charleston, the visitors found Black students and community members crowded into a “small poor school room.” At Martinsburg, Black and white residents filled the courthouse for a meeting presided over by the mayor, but the community still urgently needed a better schoolhouse.
Wheeling presented a different picture.
“At Wheeling we found a good School House well fitted up, and a good School, taught by Mr. West a colored man.”
That statement alone makes the letter an important document in the history of Black education in Wheeling. But the writer continued:
“Money arising from their city school tax which is fairly divided with the colored people, has built the house and now pays the expenses of the school.”
By the spring of 1867, Wheeling’s Colored public school was no longer simply a proposal. It possessed a schoolhouse, equipment, a teacher, students, and continuing financial support.
Most importantly, the building and its operations were being supported with public revenue.
The promise made in 1866 had become a working school
Wheeling’s Board of Education established a public school for Colored children in 1866. The federal letter provides independent, contemporary evidence of what that decision had produced within approximately one year.
The visitor found:
A good schoolhouse that was properly equipped
A functioning school considered successful by its observer
A Black teacher identified as Mr. West
A building financed through Wheeling’s city school tax
Continuing school expenses paid from public revenue
A school that attracted visits from public officials and other citizens
The school remained segregated. Its existence did not mean that Black children had achieved educational equality or that racial discrimination had disappeared from Wheeling.
It did mean that the city had accepted at least some public responsibility for their education.
This distinction was enormously important during Reconstruction. Across the nation, Black schools frequently depended on churches, missionary associations, charitable organizations, Freedmen’s Bureau assistance, and contributions from Black families who possessed few financial resources.
In Wheeling, the school was not described merely as a temporary mission or charity classroom. Municipal tax revenue had built its schoolhouse and was paying its expenses.
The city had moved from legal authorization to public infrastructure.
What did “fairly divided” mean?
The federal writer’s assertion that Wheeling’s school-tax revenue was “fairly divided with the colored people” is one of the most significant lines in the letter.
It must also be interpreted carefully.
The document does not provide an appropriation amount, an accounting ledger, a per-pupil comparison, or an explanation of how the money was divided. The phrase therefore does not prove that Black and white schools received precisely equal financial support.
It records the visiting official’s favorable assessment of Wheeling’s allocation.
Even with that limitation, the statement establishes something substantial: local school-tax revenue was being used to construct and operate a school for Black children. This was a public expenditure on Black education during the earliest years following emancipation.
It also supports an 1866 statement attributed to West Virginia’s state superintendent, who reported that Wheeling’s Black schoolhouse cost approximately $2,500. He praised its students and noted that the school was conducted by a teacher “of their own color.”
The state account and federal letter reinforce one another. Both describe a substantial schoolhouse, a Black teacher, and students whose work attracted favorable attention.
Mr. West: a Black teacher in a public institution
The federal letter identifies the school’s teacher only as “Mr. West.”
His first name does not appear in the supplied transcription and should not be guessed. We know him to be John W West, the first teacher hired by the Board of Education to teach and lead the colored school. I will be presenting much more this history in future blogs.
Additional Board of Education minutes, payroll records, city directories, newspapers, or Freedmen’s Bureau correspondence may eventually establish his full identity.
Even with only a surname, his presence is historically important.
Mr. West was a Black educator directing a publicly supported classroom at a time when white Americans continued to challenge Black intellectual ability, political citizenship, and professional authority.
His students belonged to the first generation of Black children in Wheeling for whom public education was beginning to become a recognized civic obligation.
Their school was more than a place for lessons. It was an assertion that Black children were part of the public and that their education could not justly be left outside the public school system.
A school that people came to see
The federal visitors were accompanied to the school by State Auditor T. M. McWhorter and the state treasurer, whose name is not legible in the supplied transcription.
The party examined the school register and learned that white men from Wheeling regularly visited the school. The writer also recorded an especially notable visit:
“We noticed that one day a large number of the pupils of one of the White schools with their teacher came in a body to visit the new school.”
This evidence should not be mistaken for school integration. Black and white students were still being educated separately, and a visit did not erase the larger system of racial inequality.
Nevertheless, the incident shows that the Black school was not hidden from public view. Its work was sufficiently respected—or considered sufficiently significant—to attract state officers, local citizens, teachers, and an entire group of white pupils.
The school register may once have contained the names and dates associated with those visits. If that register survives, it could be one of the most valuable records of early Black education in Wheeling.
The newspaper identifies the public hall
The federal letter concluded its discussion of Wheeling by reporting:
“The City Authorities have given them the use of a large public hall for religious meetings, rent free.”
Until now, that statement might appear to describe only an unnamed municipal space. The May 3 newspaper account adds the missing local detail.
The Intelligencer reported that the Freedmen’s Bureau officers addressed Black residents at the “Colored Church,” which it identified parenthetically as “the old City Hall in the Market House.”
This connection is extremely valuable.
The federal letter tells us that city authorities provided the hall without rent. The newspaper tells us where it was and how the Black community was using it.
Inside the Market House—a prominent center of Wheeling’s civic and commercial life—Black residents had established a place for worship, prayer, education, organizing, and public discussion.
The hall was not simply a borrowed room. It had become part of the institutional life of Black Wheeling.
An unexpected audience of 150 people
According to the newspaper, General Howard, Reverend Kimball, and Colonel Raymond arrived in Wheeling on the evening of May 2.
No public notice had been given. Their arrival happened to coincide with the congregation’s regular prayer meeting. Even without advance publicity, the paper estimated that approximately 150 Black men and women were present.
Reverend Kimball opened the gathering with prayer. Singing accompanied the addresses.
This description allows us to hear something that the federal report cannot convey by itself. The evening was not only an official inspection or administrative meeting. It was rooted in the community’s religious life.
Prayer and song surrounded a public discussion about schools, labor, citizenship, savings, and the future.
That combination was characteristic of Black institution-building after emancipation. Churches frequently served simultaneously as houses of worship, schools, meeting halls, political forums, and centers of mutual aid.
In Wheeling, the old City Hall had become such a place.
Wheeling, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Howard University
Reverend Kimball explained the general purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau and described its educational work. According to the newspaper, he reported that more than 6,000 Black students were attending Bureau-associated schools within a jurisdiction that included the District of Columbia, West Virginia, and six Maryland counties.
He then spoke about an ambitious new institution being developed near Washington.
The Bureau, he said, had acquired approximately 150 acres on which a university would be established for the education of Black men and women. It was intended to become a complete institution, eventually offering instruction in fields such as medicine, philosophy, literature, science, and theology.
It would be called Howard University in honor of General Oliver O. Howard.
The federal letter adds a precise detail: arrangements had been completed for Howard University’s Normal and Preparatory Departments to open on May 1, 1867.
The timing is remarkable. As Howard University was beginning its educational work in Washington, Bureau representatives were in West Virginia examining schools and speaking to Black communities about the possibilities education could create.
The new university and Wheeling’s new public school occupied very different places within that educational landscape, but they emerged from the same Reconstruction-era struggle: the demand that freedom include access to learning.
General Howard addresses Black Wheeling
General Charles H. Howard followed Kimball.
The newspaper reported that he congratulated Wheeling’s Black residents on what he considered their prosperous condition and the favorable regard in which they were held by many white residents.
He explained that the Bureau’s purpose was to help formerly enslaved people become “independent and self-supporting, useful and intelligent men and women.”
Howard encouraged his listeners to seek employment in every trade and branch of business. He urged them to excel in their work, pursue education, avoid intoxicating liquor, save money, and establish night schools.
His emphasis on skilled employment is especially noteworthy. Education was not presented simply as the ability to read and write. It was connected to economic independence, professional advancement, savings, and the ability to build durable institutions.
Howard also encouraged the audience to use the Freedman’s Savings Bank system and to set aside part of their wages regularly.
For Black families emerging from slavery, financial independence was inseparable from freedom. Savings could help a family secure housing, establish a business, educate children, respond to emergencies, and reduce dependence upon employers or public officials.
The address therefore joined education and economics as parts of the same larger project.
The limits of the message
The newspaper’s account is encouraging, but it also contains the paternalism and racial assumptions of its time.
Howard reportedly declared that Black people possessed the same natural rights as white people. Yet he also expressed hope that, once Black citizens demonstrated through their conduct that they were “fitted for the elective franchise,” voting rights would be granted to them.
That was not equality.
White citizens were rarely asked to prove their education, thrift, sobriety, or moral character before being considered entitled to political rights. Black citizenship was being treated as conditional—something to be earned through behavior rather than recognized as a right.
The newspaper’s own conclusion followed the same pattern. Its reporter suggested that education, labor, thrift, and “good behavior” were helping Black Wheeling residents earn a position of respect in the community.
Black residents, however, did not need to earn their humanity or natural rights. Their pursuit of education and economic security demonstrated their determination, not the validity of an unequal standard imposed upon them.
Recognizing the paternalism in these statements does not diminish the importance of the meeting. It allows us to read the source honestly: as evidence of both new possibilities and the racial limits that continued to surround them.
“They are doing well”
The federal official who inspected Wheeling’s school concluded:
“The Colored people in Wheeling have evidently fallen among friends, and they are doing well.”
The statement records a favorable impression formed during a brief visit. It does not prove that Wheeling had achieved racial equality. Black residents continued to live within a segregated society and would face discrimination in schools, housing, employment, politics, and public accommodations for generations.
But when placed beside the newspaper account, the official’s words become more understandable.
He had found:
A publicly financed schoolhouse for Black children
A Black teacher leading the school
Students receiving favorable evaluations
Municipal school-tax revenue supporting their education
State officials visiting their classroom
A public hall provided without rent
A congregation of approximately 150 Black residents assembled for prayer, education, and community discussion
A city in which the work of Black institutions was visible to the larger public
The praise belonged not only to public officials. It belonged especially to Wheeling’s Black residents.
They were doing well because they were organizing, teaching, learning, worshiping, working, saving, and building institutions during one of the most uncertain periods in American history.
Two records, one transformative moment
The federal letter and newspaper report do not have a perfectly simple chronology.
The federal document is dated May 1 and describes a completed five-day journey through West Virginia. The May 3 newspaper says that Howard, Kimball, and Raymond arrived in Wheeling on May 2. The newspaper may document a return visit, another stage of Bureau activity, or a closely related trip following the one described in the report.
Without a more complete itinerary, the two accounts should not automatically be treated as descriptions of a single visit.
But they unquestionably document the same extraordinary historical moment.
One records what federal representatives found inside Wheeling’s Black school. The other records what Bureau officers said when they stood before the city’s Black community.
One describes public investment in a schoolhouse. The other describes approximately 150 people filling a church and meeting hall.
One praises the teacher and students. The other shows the larger community discussing education, employment, financial independence, and citizenship.
Together, they reveal that the founding of the Black public school was not an isolated act. It belonged to a much broader movement of institution-building within Black Wheeling.
The beginning of the Lincoln School story
The public school established in 1866 developed into the institution later known as Lincoln School. For generations, Lincoln would stand at the center of Black educational and cultural life in Wheeling.
That later history can make the school’s beginning appear inevitable.
It was not.
In 1867, Black public education remained a contested national experiment. The Civil War had ended only two years earlier. The meaning of emancipation was still being fought over. Millions of Black Americans were asserting rights that slavery had denied, while opponents worked to limit the reach of freedom.
In that moment, Wheeling had a Black public school built and supported with municipal tax revenue. A Black teacher stood at the front of its classroom. Students were earning praise for their conduct and scholarship. Public officials were entering the building to observe their progress.
Nearby, in the old City Hall at the Market House, Black men and women gathered for worship and heard national leaders speak about education, labor, savings, and citizenship.
These were not separate stories.
The schoolhouse, the church, the prayer meeting, the public addresses, and the community’s aspirations were all parts of the same struggle to give practical meaning to freedom.
Why these records matter
The story of Wheeling’s Black school has often been told through later histories, anniversary programs, Board of Education records, and memories of Lincoln School.
The 1867 federal letter and newspaper account bring us closer to the beginning.
They give us two independent contemporary witnesses. They identify people, places, public expenditures, and community activities. They confirm that Wheeling’s Black educational institutions were functioning, visible, and attracting official attention almost immediately after their founding.
They also leave important questions for further research:
Who was Mr. West, the school’s Black teacher?
Where are the original Board of Education proceedings establishing the school?
How much tax revenue was appropriated for its construction and operation?
What formula led the federal visitor to describe the money as “fairly divided”?
Does the school register examined by the visitors survive?
Which white school sent its teacher and pupils to visit?
Who were the approximately 150 people assembled at the Market House?
Did Wheeling’s Black residents record their own reactions to the Bureau officers’ addresses?
What other religious, educational, and civic activities took place in the old City Hall?
The official documents tell us how government representatives and newspaper writers viewed Black Wheeling. The next challenge is to recover the voices of the Black residents who built and sustained these institutions.
A community building its future
On a May evening in 1867, Black Wheeling residents gathered for prayer inside a public hall they had transformed into a church.
They sang. They listened. They considered the meaning of education, labor, financial independence, and citizenship.
Elsewhere in the city stood a recently established public school for their children—a good schoolhouse, according to a federal visitor, well equipped and led by a Black teacher.
These institutions were evidence of far more than official generosity. They were the products of Black determination.
Families sent their children to school. Students applied themselves to their lessons. A Black teacher assumed professional responsibility for their education. Worshipers filled the Market House. Community members created institutions capable of carrying their aspirations forward.
The federal visitors recognized that something important was happening in Wheeling.
More than 150 years later, these surviving records allow us to recognize it as well.
The school established in 1866 would grow into Lincoln School. The congregation gathered in the old City Hall belonged to a larger community whose churches, educators, families, and civic leaders would shape Black life in Wheeling for generations.
They were not waiting for history to include them.
They were already making it.
-T
Sources and research notes
Primary federal source: Monthly report concerning schools for Black children, Washington, May 1, 1867, addressed to Brevet Senior Colonel W. W. Rogers, Acting Assistant Adjutant General. National Museum of African American History and Culture, Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal.
Primary newspaper source: “Meeting of the Colored People Last Evening—Addresses by Officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau,” Wheeling Intelligencer, May 3, 1867, p. 4.
Federal archival context: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives and Records Administration.
Corroborating state account: Carter G. Woodson, “Early Negro Education in West Virginia,” The Journal of Negro History 7, no. 1 (January 1922), reproducing the West Virginia state superintendent’s 1866 description of Wheeling’s school. Read the transcribed article.
The federal letter is dated May 1, while the newspaper reports the arrival of Howard, Kimball, and Raymond on May 2. This article therefore treats the sources as records of closely connected Freedmen’s Bureau activity rather than assuming without further evidence that they describe one identical visit.
The historical terms “Colored” and “Freedmen” are retained when quoting documents, reproducing period titles, or identifying institutions as they appeared in the sources. Elsewhere, this article uses Black or African American.
