“Normal, but Different” American Students
Wheeling’s Colored School and the Shared Rituals of Arbor Day, 1884
On April 26, 1884, the Wheeling Register devoted considerable space to what it called a “glorious” Arbor Day celebration in the city’s public schools.
Trees had been planted and dedicated. Schoolrooms were decorated. Children sang songs, read essays, delivered recitations, and explained the value of forests. Parents, school officials, and community members gathered to watch.
The newspaper reported separately on Washington, Clay, Union, Centre, Webster, Madison, Ritchie—and the Colored School.
That placement is historically significant.
In a city still operating a racially segregated school system, the Colored School was nevertheless presented as a participant in the same citywide educational celebration. Its pupils planted trees, performed music, studied American writers, honored national figures, and stood before visitors just as children did throughout Wheeling.
They were ordinary American students participating in the customs of American public education.
They were “different” only because the laws and institutions surrounding them insisted upon treating them that way.
A New American School Tradition
Arbor Day was still a relatively new observance in 1884. The first official Arbor Day had been held in Nebraska in 1872, and the idea quickly spread through the nation’s schools.
West Virginia’s state school superintendent introduced an Arbor Day observance into the state’s schools in 1883. Wheeling’s celebration the following year was therefore part of an emerging educational movement that combined environmental stewardship, literature, music, civic memory, and public ceremony.
The Register declared that Arbor Day should become “one of the institutions of the city schools.”
The newspaper believed that planting trees would teach children to appreciate beauty, develop good character, and form an enduring attachment to their schools. A tree planted by a child would grow alongside that child, becoming what the article described as a living reminder of youth and happier days.
But this was about more than trees.
Arbor Day programs introduced students to American poetry, history, citizenship, conservation, public speaking, and collective responsibility. Children learned that they could improve the physical appearance of their school while contributing something that future generations would inherit.
It was environmental education, civic instruction, and community celebration combined into a single school day.
And Wheeling’s Black children were fully participating.
The Colored School Takes Its Place
The newspaper preserved the names of many of the young people who participated in the Colored School’s Arbor Day celebration. Even more remarkably, Lincoln School’s 1949–50 yearbook contains a retrospective alumni register that allows us to follow several of those students into their recorded graduating classes.
The school had an advanced department, a grammar department, Grade B, and additional divisions identified as C and D. That structure alone offers valuable evidence of how far the institution had developed since its founding.
The advanced pupils sang “Beautiful Spring” and “Our Boat Is Off.” They presented readings, essays, declamations, and explanations with titles such as “The Voice of the Tree,” “Tree Planting,” “The Forest,” “Historical Trees,” and “The Various Uses of Trees.”
Its program was not an afterthought.
The newspaper preserved the names of some of those students:
Theophelas Thompson — Class of 1885
Henry Norris — Class of 1885
John Turner — Class of 1885
William Dennis — Class of 1886
Gertrude Allen — Class of 1887
George McMechen — Class of 1889
Maggie Beasley — Class of 1891
Carrie Young — Class of 1891
Other students named in the Arbor Day program included Zaureau B. Nelson, Henry L. Streets, Annie Jones, Annie Gardener, and William Johnson.
These names transform the account from an institutional report into a human story.
We can imagine the students rehearsing their assignments, trying to remember their lines, waiting nervously for their names to be called, and looking toward their teachers for reassurance. We can imagine proud parents and visitors standing nearby as children sang, read, and spoke before an audience.
They were doing what students have always done: learning, performing, worrying, laughing, competing, and hoping to make their families and teachers proud.
Planting a Tree for Abraham Lincoln
The most symbolically powerful moment came when the senior class planted and dedicated a tree to Abraham Lincoln.
John Turner, for example, did more than recite his assigned selection. As a member of the Class of 1885, he stood on the threshold of completing his education at Lincoln. During the Arbor Day program, he delivered the eulogy when the senior class dedicated its tree to Abraham Lincoln. The symbolism is difficult to miss: a young Black student, born in the generation following emancipation, honoring the president whose name his school would eventually bear.
In another school, such a dedication might have represented a general lesson in patriotism and presidential history. At Wheeling’s Colored School, its meaning must have been deeper.
These children were attending a public school that had been created only eighteen years earlier, in 1866, during the first years following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
Their parents and grandparents had lived through a time when educating Black children was opposed, restricted, or entirely denied. Some members of the community may have personally experienced slavery or lived alongside people who had.
Now their children stood on public-school grounds, planted a living memorial, and spoke the name of Abraham Lincoln before teachers, families, and city officials.
The dedication joined national history to local experience.
Lincoln was not simply a distant president in a textbook. For Black Americans in 1884, he remained inseparable from emancipation, the destruction of slavery, and the unfinished promise of citizenship.
The tree offered a visible declaration: these students understood themselves as part of the American story.
Honoring Writers, Teachers, and Memory
The Colored School’s pupils also dedicated trees to other figures.
Grade B planted and dedicated a tree to the poets Alice and Phoebe Cary. Pupils read “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” wrote essays about trees, and sang seasonal songs.
Students in the C and D divisions presented selections from prominent authors and poets. They studied the life of John Greenleaf Whittier and dedicated a tree in his honor.
Whittier was not merely a celebrated American poet. He was also an outspoken abolitionist whose writings connected literature with the struggle against slavery. Whether every child understood the full extent of that history cannot be known, but his inclusion placed the pupils within a literary tradition carrying special resonance for Black Americans.
Another tree was dedicated to the memory of a deceased former principal of the school, with William Johnson presenting a eulogy.
The pupils were therefore learning to honor several kinds of legacy: the national leadership of Lincoln, the literary contributions of American writers, and the local service of an educator who had worked within their own school.
They were learning that history could be national and local at the same time.
From John W. West to Arbor Day
The 1884 account becomes even more meaningful when placed beside the Colored School’s beginnings.
In the fall of 1866, the Wheeling Board of Education established the school as part of the city’s tax-supported public-school system. It was not founded as a private charity or temporary missionary effort. It was created, funded, and administered by the public school authorities.
The early school began with limited resources, uncertain facilities, and a very small faculty. Its continued existence could not be taken for granted.
By 1884, however, the newspaper was describing multiple departments, several grade levels, organized literary programs, named students, a senior class, former principals, and participation in a citywide public-school celebration.
That is an extraordinary development across only eighteen years.
The children performing on Arbor Day were the beneficiaries of decisions made before many of them had been born. They inherited the work of John W. West, Robert West, Black parents, community advocates, teachers, school officials, and others who insisted that Black children belonged within Wheeling’s public educational system.
Shared Participation Was Not Equal Treatment
The article is uplifting, but it should not be misread.
The Colored School’s participation in Arbor Day did not mean that Wheeling had achieved educational equality.
The newspaper still identified it separately by race. Black children remained confined to a segregated institution. They could sing many of the same songs, read many of the same authors, and participate in the same civic rituals as white students—but they could not freely attend the same schools.
Their participation was shared. Their treatment was not equal.
That contradiction is at the heart of this historical record.
The pupils of the Colored School were being prepared for American citizenship while living in a society that placed racial boundaries around that citizenship. They learned about liberty, patriotism, literature, character, nature, and civic responsibility within a system that denied them equal access to public education.
They were “normal but different” American students.
They were normal in their curiosity, talents, anxieties, friendships, ambitions, and desire to belong.
They were normal in the pride they felt while speaking before their families.
They were normal in the songs they sang and the lessons they studied.
They were different because segregation made them different.
The difference was imposed upon the children. It did not originate within them.
Americana Belonged to Them, Too
The term “Americana” often brings to mind flags, patriotic songs, school ceremonies, famous presidents, celebrated poets, and community traditions.
Every element was present in Wheeling’s 1884 Arbor Day program.
The pupils of the Colored School sang spring songs. They studied American writers. They delivered public speeches. They honored Abraham Lincoln. They planted trees for future generations. They participated in a civic celebration alongside the city’s other public schools.
They were not standing outside American culture and asking to be admitted.
They were already creating it.
Black Americans were not merely observers of the nation’s traditions. They were students, teachers, speakers, musicians, writers, athletes, church members, taxpayers, parents, and civic participants. They embraced the country’s promises even when the country repeatedly failed to extend those promises equally to them.
The Arbor Day article allows us to see that participation in an unusually intimate way.
Instead of encountering Black children only through statistics or administrative reports, we encounter Carrie Young singing, Maggie Beasley reciting, Gertrude Allen reading, John Turner honoring Lincoln, and William Johnson remembering a former educator.
For one spring afternoon in 1884, the newspaper permits us to enter their schoolyard.
The Trees and the Children
We do not yet know what became of every tree planted that day.
Perhaps some survived for decades. Perhaps children later walked past them as adults and remembered where they had stood during the dedication. Perhaps former pupils pointed them out to their own children.
Buildings disappear. School names change. Neighborhoods are redeveloped. Trees are lost to age, storms, construction, or neglect.
But the newspaper preserved the act of planting.
It preserved a moment when Black children in Wheeling placed roots into the same soil as the city’s other students and claimed their place in its educational and civic life.
That is why seemingly ordinary school reports can carry such extraordinary importance.
The pupils were participating in an American tradition.
They were honoring American figures.
They were receiving an American education.
They were helping shape an American city.
Segregation placed them in a separate school, but it could not make their hopes, talents, or contributions any less American.
Their trees belonged to Wheeling.
Their school belonged to Wheeling.
And their history belongs to all of us.
-T
Historical terminology note
The name “Colored School” is used in this post because it was the designation printed by the Wheeling Register and used by public authorities during the period. It is presented here only within its historical context.
Primary source
“Arbor Day,” The Wheeling Register, April 26, 1884. The article reported on Arbor Day exercises conducted the previous day in Wheeling’s public schools, including the city’s Colored School.
