In His Own Hand: John W. West’s 1867 Letter and the Brothers Who Taught Wheeling
Sometimes history returns to us through a government report, a newspaper column, or the minutes of an official board of education meeting.
And sometimes it returns in a person’s own handwriting.
Among the records available through the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal is a small handwritten letter dated April 10, 1867. It was written in Wheeling by John W. West, the first teacher of the city’s first public school for Black children. One of the oldest in the country that was funded completely by tax dollars.
The letter is addressed to John Kimball, the Freedmen’s Bureau official responsible for supervising schools in a district that included West Virginia. As well as Major General O. O. Howard.
More than 150 years after West placed his pen against the paper, we can still see his cursive handwriting. We can see how he formed the word “Wheeling,” how he addressed Kimball, how he described his brother’s qualifications, and how he signed his own name:
Jno. W. West.
“Jno.” was a common nineteenth-century abbreviation for John.
This is not a later account written about Wheeling’s first Black public-school teacher. It is not a name copied into an anniversary program or remembered many decades afterward.
These are John W. West’s own words, written by his own hand while he was teaching in Wheeling.
That alone makes the letter an extraordinary discovery.
But its contents reveal something even more remarkable: West was writing to help his brother, Robert West, obtain a teaching position. Later in 1867, the Wheeling Board of Education would employ Robert, placing the two brothers together in the city’s Black public school.
A letter from Wheeling
At the top of the page, West wrote:
“Wheeling April 10th /67”
He addressed the letter to:
“Mr. Jno. Kimball Supt. School”
John Kimball was closely connected to the educational work of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau had been created in 1865 to assist formerly enslaved people and other refugees during the difficult transition from slavery to freedom.
Education quickly became one of its most consequential responsibilities.
The Bureau helped monitor schools, coordinate teachers, gather statistics, distribute assistance, and document the growth of Black education during Reconstruction. Its surviving education records include correspondence, school schedules, teachers’ reports, and statistical summaries. The National Archives describes these materials as part of the Bureau’s extensive Education Division records.
West’s letter belonged to that administrative network—but it was also deeply personal.
He asked Kimball about possible teaching opportunities and then explained why he was asking:
“I have a Brother who is well qualified to teach in Normal Schools, or an Intermediate department…”
The brother was Robert N West.
John was not merely asking for a favor. He was presenting Robert as a qualified educator capable of teaching beyond the most elementary level. His reference to normal and intermediate schools suggests that Robert possessed meaningful academic preparation and was ready for professional responsibility.
Within a matter of months, that advocacy would bear fruit.
Later in 1867, the Wheeling Board of Education hired Robert West. The brothers would teach together in the same school established for Wheeling’s colored children.
Wheeling’s first Black public-school teacher
John W. West already occupied a historic position when he wrote the letter.
In 1866, Wheeling’s Board of Education established a public school for colored children. West became its first teacher.
This was only one year after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The meaning of freedom was still being contested across the nation. Black citizenship remained unsettled, and public education for Black children was far from universally accepted.
Yet in Wheeling, a Black educator was teaching in a school established by the city’s Board of Education.
An educator was corresponding monthly with the head of education for the US government at a fragile time in the country's history.
A federal official later described what he found during a visit:
“At Wheeling we found a good School House well fitted up, and a good School, taught by Mr. West a colored man.”
The same May 1, 1867, report stated that money collected through Wheeling’s city school tax had built the schoolhouse and was paying the school’s expenses.
The discovery of John’s April letter allows us to identify that “Mr. West” more fully.
He was John W. West.
He was not merely a name in a federal report. He was an educator corresponding with school officials, submitting reports, managing the responsibilities of a new public institution, and attempting to bring another qualified Black teacher—his own brother—into the profession.
Why John was submitting reports
Near the bottom of the letter, West added a short postscript:
“my report is not as good for this month … as the past month. Owing to sickness”
The handwriting and sentence construction make a few connecting words difficult to determine, but the essential meaning is clear. The school’s monthly report was not as favorable as the previous month’s report because of sickness.
West did not specify whether the illness affected him, his students, or several members of the school community. Nevertheless, the statement gives us a rare glimpse into the ordinary difficulties of operating the school.
It also explains why a letter from a teacher employed by Wheeling’s Board of Education survives in the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
The letter adds a precise detail: John W West is addressing THE Major General O. O. Howard. The namesake for the Historically Black College University (HBCU), Howard University or Howard University’s Normal and Preparatory Departments to open on May 1, 1867. Well after the colored school of Wheeling founding.
Major General Howard was commissioner of The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau.
Schools participating in the Bureau’s national educational reporting system were expected to submit regular status reports. That reporting extended beyond schools founded or directly operated by the Bureau. Locally established schools serving colored students—including Wheeling’s municipal school—were brought into the Bureau’s wider system of educational documentation.
The reports helped officials track such matters as:
The number of schools and teachers
Student enrollment and attendance
Changes from one month to another
The condition of school buildings
Sources of financial support
The race and gender of teachers
The subjects being taught
Illnesses, closures, and other interruptions
The need for additional teachers or facilities
Wheeling’s school had been established and financed locally, but its progress became part of a national federal record of Black education.
That distinction is important. The presence of West’s letter in Freedmen’s Bureau records does not mean the Bureau founded Wheeling’s school. It means that the school’s development was being observed and documented within the Bureau’s national educational program.
Because John W. West submitted those reports, his handwriting survives today.
The human story behind the statistics
Monthly school reports often reduce history to numbers: pupils enrolled, pupils attending, teachers employed, and schools in operation.
John West’s letter reminds us that people stood behind every total.
A report could decline because children or teachers became sick. A classroom could need another instructor. A qualified teacher could be searching for an opportunity. A brother already inside the educational system could use his connections to help another brother enter it.
John was simultaneously serving his students, complying with federal reporting requirements, communicating with a senior education official, and advocating for Robert.
That advocacy reveals initiative and professional confidence.
John knew whom to contact. He understood the types of positions that might be available.
He was able to describe Robert’s qualifications in the language of nineteenth-century education. He used his relationship with Kimball to place his brother’s name before someone connected to a much larger network of schools.
This was Black professional networking during Reconstruction.
It was also a family working to advance the education of Black children.
Robert joins his brother
John’s request was ultimately successful—not necessarily through Kimball alone, but through the local public-school system in which John was already working.
Later in 1867, the Wheeling Board of Education hired Robert West. John and Robert then served as teachers in the same Black public school.
The sequence is remarkable:
In 1866, Wheeling established its public school for Black children.
John W. West became its first teacher.
On April 10, 1867, John wrote to John Kimball about a position for his qualified brother.
The letter became part of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s education records.
A May 1 federal report praised Wheeling’s school and identified its teacher as “Mr. West.”
Later in 1867, the Wheeling Board of Education employed Robert West.
The West brothers taught together in the institution that would develop into Lincoln School.
The history of Lincoln School therefore begins not only with legislation, taxation, and decisions made by public officials. It begins with Black educators.
Before generations of students passed through Lincoln’s classrooms, two brothers stood near the beginning of its story.
Black educators building Black education
John’s letter helps correct a common misunderstanding about Reconstruction education.
Black people were not simply passive recipients of schools created for them by government agencies or white charitable organizations. They were teachers, organizers, advocates, fundraisers, parents, students, ministers, and institutional leaders.
John W. West was already doing the work.
He was teaching Wheeling’s Black children. He was preparing the required reports. He was communicating with the Freedmen’s Bureau. He was assessing the needs of his school. He was identifying another qualified Black educator and attempting to create an opportunity for him.
Robert West’s eventual appointment expanded that work.
Together, the brothers represented the growth of a Black professional teaching community at a moment when public education for formerly enslaved people and their children was still new and politically contested.
Their presence mattered inside the classroom. Black children could see educated Black men occupying positions of authority and responsibility. The West brothers were evidence that education could lead not merely to literacy, but to professional service, leadership, and the ability to build institutions for the next generation.
A document that brings John closer
Historical research frequently tells us what someone did. It is rarer to encounter something that person physically created.
The image of this letter brings John W. West closer to us.
The page preserves the movement of his hand. His words rise and fall across the paper. Some letters are carefully formed; others run together. The ink darkens where his pen pressed harder. His postscript about sickness appears beneath his principal request, followed by the respectful closing and his signature.
We are not looking at a transcription produced decades later.
We are looking at the handwriting of the man who entered Wheeling’s first Black public-school classroom as its teacher.
The physical document creates a connection that a typed name cannot reproduce. John is no longer only “Mr. West” in someone else’s report. He becomes the author of his own surviving record.
He had concerns, responsibilities, professional relationships, and hopes for his brother. He understood that education was growing and that qualified Black teachers would be needed to sustain it.
The letter captures him in the middle of that work.
An extraordinary convergence of records
The importance of this discovery becomes even clearer when the surviving sources are placed together.
The April 10 letter gives us John’s own voice.
The May 1 federal report describes the quality of his school, the public financing behind it, and the favorable impression it made upon visiting officials.
The May 3 Wheeling Intelligencer account documents a large gathering of Black residents addressed by Freedmen’s Bureau representatives, including Kimball.
Wheeling Board of Education records later document Robert West’s employment.
Each source contributes something different:
The letter identifies John and reveals his advocacy for Robert.
The federal report evaluates the school John was teaching.
The newspaper places the school within a larger moment of Black institution-building in Wheeling.
The Board record shows that Robert ultimately joined his brother.
Together, they transform a brief reference to “Mr. West” into the story of two pioneering Black educators.
Preserving the names of the builders
John and Robert West were helping construct something that would outlive them.
The school they served would develop into Lincoln School, an institution that educated generations of Black children during Wheeling’s long era of segregated education. Lincoln would become one of the intellectual and cultural centers of the city’s Black community.
That history did not begin with the later buildings that carried Lincoln’s name.
It began in 1866, when Wheeling opened a public school for Black children and John W. West entered its classroom as the first teacher.
It continued in 1867, when John wrote to a federal education official on behalf of his brother.
And it expanded when Robert was hired and the two brothers taught together.
Their work deserves to be remembered because they were more than employees of a school system. They were builders of an educational tradition.
Written by his own hand
On April 10, 1867, John W. West could not have known where his letter would eventually travel.
He could not have known that the Freedmen’s Bureau records would survive, that they would become part of one of the nation’s most significant African American historical archives, or that researchers would read his handwriting more than a century and a half later.
He was addressing an immediate need.
His monthly report had been weakened by sickness. His brother Robert was qualified to teach. Schools needed educators. John believed an opportunity might exist, and he wrote to ask about it.
The letter was brief, but its meaning is immense.
It preserves the handwriting of Wheeling’s first Black public-school teacher.
It identifies the man whom a federal visitor praised simply as “Mr. West.”
It documents one Black educator advocating for another.
And it helps restore John and Robert West to their rightful place at the beginning of Wheeling’s Black educational history.
It documents John W West's confidence to address not only the US government's head of education, Mr Kimball, but also THE Major General Oliver Otis Howard, the head of the Freedman Bureau itself.
The school was new. The future was uncertain. The obstacles were enormous.
But John W. West was already teaching, already reporting, already organizing, and already reaching back to bring his brother forward.
Stay tuned for much much more on the founding of the Colored School of Wheeling, the students and faculty.
-T
Sources and research notes
Primary manuscript: John W. West to John Kimball, Wheeling, April 10, 1867, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands education records, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal, image NMAAHC-007675727_00732.
Related federal report: Monthly report concerning schools for Black children, Washington, May 1, 1867. The report describes Wheeling’s school as a good, properly equipped school taught by “Mr. West” and supported through municipal school-tax revenue. View the record through the Smithsonian’s Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal.
Federal archival context: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, including Education Division records, school reports, schedules, and correspondence. National Archives and Records Administration.
Local employment record: Wheeling Board of Education records documenting Robert West’s employment later in 1867.
The wording “colored school” is retained only when describing the historical institution or language of the period; elsewhere, the article uses Black or African American.
