The Boy Who Crossed the River for School
Imagining Lorenzo Lucas’s Journey from Bellaire to Wheeling, 1868–1876
The following is a work of historically grounded imagination. Lorenzo Lucas was a real child identified in Wheeling Board of Education records. His admission to Wheeling’s Colored School, the tuition charged, the school’s history, and the district’s approved textbooks are documented. His daily route, conversations, friendships, feelings, and eight-year educational journey are imagined to help us consider what this remarkable experience may have meant.
A Small Item with a Very Large Story
On December 10, 1868, The Wheeling Intelligencer published a summary of the previous evening’s meeting of the Wheeling Board of Education.
Among reports about enrollment, attendance, salaries, repairs, maps, bills, and other ordinary school business was an extraordinary request. Dr. Baird presented a communication from Superintendent F. S. Williams concerning what the newspaper called a “non-resident colored youth” who wished to attend Wheeling’s Colored School at a reduced tuition.
Board member Mr. Wheat moved that the student be admitted for $2.50 per quarter—half the usual amount. After proposed amendments failed, the motion carried.
The newspaper did not print the child’s name. The surviving Board of Education record did.
He was Lorenzo Lucas of Bellaire, Ohio.
A few lines in a meeting report are all that the public record gives us. They do not tell us Lorenzo’s age, where his family lived in Bellaire, why they selected Wheeling’s school, or how he traveled there. They do not tell us whether he was nervous on his first morning, whether he loved arithmetic, or whether he dreaded recitation.
They do, however, permit us to ask a marvelous question:
What might it have been like for a Black child, only three years after the abolition of slavery, to leave his Ohio community and cross the river into the young state of West Virginia in pursuit of an education?
Let us imagine.
Grade One: The First Crossing
Before Lorenzo learned to read the river on a map, he would have known it as a living thing.
The Ohio River divided his home from his school. It marked the boundary between Ohio and West Virginia, but it was not an empty line drawn in an atlas. It moved. It rose after heavy rain. It carried driftwood, coal boats, freight, travelers, news, and danger. In winter, ice could gather along its banks. In fog, the opposite shore might seem to disappear.
In 1868, the railroad bridge between Bellaire and Benwood had not yet opened. That crossing would not carry its first train until June 1871. Lorenzo therefore may have crossed by ferry, although the records discovered so far do not identify his route.
We can picture him approaching the landing in the morning with his books wrapped against the weather. Perhaps a parent accompanied him at first. Perhaps, as he grew older, he made the journey with workers bound for the mills, passengers conducting business in Wheeling, and families carrying baskets or parcels across the river.
The ferryman might have known him before long.
“There’s the schoolboy,” someone may have said.
On the far bank, Lorenzo still had distance to travel. He may have walked, ridden in a wagon, or found some combination of available transportation toward Wheeling. The exact route is lost to us. What remains is the certainty that the journey demanded planning, money, time, and confidence.
For an adult, Bellaire and Wheeling were neighboring river communities.
For a young child, Wheeling may have seemed like a “foreign” city in a “foreign” state.
The streets were louder. Wagons rattled over the road. Factory whistles divided the day. Horses pulled loads through mud and dust. Smoke hung over an industrial city filled with merchants, laborers, travelers, and strangers.
Some of those strangers would have watched him.
In an era when segregation was enforced by both law and custom, a Black child carrying schoolbooks across state lines represented more than an ordinary student. Lorenzo was the visible result of a family decision: education was worth the tuition, the transportation, the uncertainty, and the daily river crossing.
A School Created by the Public
Lorenzo was not coming to a charity classroom or an informal private school.
Wheeling’s Colored School had been established by the Wheeling Board of Education in the fall of 1866 as part of the city’s public-school system. It was supported by public tax dollars. John W. West, a Black educator, became its first teacher. His brother Robert West was later hired by the Board of Education, giving the school two Black instructors during the first years following the Civil War.
John West also submitted reports connected to the Freedmen’s Bureau’s national system of monitoring Black education. A Bureau official visiting Wheeling in 1867 reported finding a well-equipped schoolhouse, a good school, and a school supported by city taxes that were being divided with Wheeling’s Black residents.
That history matters.
Lorenzo was crossing the Ohio River to enter an institution Black citizens, educators, and public officials had already worked to establish. The school stood as evidence that public education for Black children was not simply a hopeful idea. In Wheeling, it had become an operating public responsibility.
Lorenzo was entering a school shaped by the work of John and Robert West and by the determination of Wheeling’s Black families. Whether either brother personally taught him in every imagined year cannot presently be established. But Lorenzo entered the educational world they helped build.
Grade One: Letters Become Words
On his first days, Lorenzo might have begun with Ray’s Speller and one of Parker and Watson’s Readers, both included among the textbooks approved for use in Wheeling’s schools.
The teacher pronounced a sound. The students repeated it.
A letter became a syllable. A syllable became a word. A word became a sentence.
Perhaps Lorenzo traced letters on a slate before copying them onto paper. Paper cost money and could not be wasted. A broken piece of chalk or slate pencil might be used until it became almost too small to hold.
He may have practiced his name repeatedly:
Lorenzo Lucas.
To write one’s own name is an ordinary childhood accomplishment. In 1868, however, literacy carried profound meaning for a Black child. Slavery had depended in part upon denying education to millions of African Americans. Now, only a few years after emancipation, Lorenzo could sit in a publicly supported classroom and place his own name on a page.
Each letter declared his presence.
Each completed lesson contradicted a system that had insisted Black children should not be taught.
When school ended, he carried those letters back across the river.
Grade Two: A Hand of His Own
The district’s approved books included the penmanship series of Payson, Dunton and Scribner. Its carefully formed letters promised discipline, order, and a hand that others could read.
Lorenzo may have copied lines until his fingers cramped.
He might have been told to sit straight, hold his pen properly, and avoid blotting the paper.
He may have looked at the teacher’s handwriting and wondered whether his own would ever appear so certain.
At home in Bellaire, his family might have examined his work by lamplight. Someone may have asked him to read a notice, copy a name, or explain a word from the newspaper.
School learning rarely remained inside the schoolhouse. A child who could read and write carried those abilities into the household and the community.
Perhaps Lorenzo began writing short notes for people who had never received the opportunity he was receiving. Perhaps neighbors asked what he was learning “over in Wheeling.” Perhaps younger children gathered around when he opened a reader.
His education belonged to him, but its possibilities traveled farther.
Grade Three: Learning to Count the Cost
With Brooks’ Arithmetical Series, Lorenzo would have encountered numbers, sums, measures, fractions, and practical problems.
He already understood that numbers mattered.
The Board had set his tuition at $2.50 per quarter—half the usual amount. To modern eyes, $2.50 may appear almost insignificant. It was not.
Using historical consumer-price estimates, $2.50 in 1868 possessed roughly the purchasing power of $63 in 2026 dollars. If tuition were collected for four quarters during a full school year, the Lucas family would have paid $10—approximately $251 in present-day purchasing power.
Even that comparison may understate the sacrifice.
Historical wage data compiled from American manufacturing establishments place the average daily wage of a laborer in 1868 at approximately $1.51. Lorenzo’s quarterly tuition therefore represented about one and two-thirds days of an average laborer’s gross pay. Four quarters would have required the equivalent of more than six and a half full days of labor—before the family purchased clothing or supplies or paid anything associated with transportation across the river.
For a Black family, the burden may have been heavier still. African Americans in the years immediately following the Civil War often faced restricted employment opportunities, unequal compensation, and uncertain or irregular work. We do not yet know the occupation or income of Lorenzo’s parents, so their precise financial circumstances cannot be calculated. We can say, however, that this was not a symbolic payment or an effortless expense.
Tuition was only the beginning.
There may have been ferry fares, additional transportation between Benwood and Wheeling, books or writing materials, suitable clothing, and meals for a child spending much of the day away from home. The family also surrendered whatever work Lorenzo might otherwise have performed around the house or to help support the household.
The Board’s decision to reduce the customary tuition from $5 to $2.50 per quarter may therefore have been what transformed a family’s ambition into a practical possibility.
How many crossings could be purchased with a day’s wages?
How much income could a family spare for a child’s schooling?
How many other necessities would have to wait?
These were not exercises printed in Lorenzo’s arithmetic book. They were the arithmetic of opportunity.
Inside the classroom, however, numbers could become something more than cost. They could become command. Lorenzo might work a problem on the board, hear the teacher say that his answer was correct, and experience the satisfaction of bringing order to a difficult question.
His Bellaire friends may have teased him about carrying books across the river. His Wheeling classmates may have called him “the Ohio boy.” He belonged fully to neither place during the school day and yet, in another sense, belonged to both.
He had friends at home who knew the streets of Bellaire.
He had friends at school who knew the streets of Wheeling.
The river divided their neighborhoods, but Lorenzo’s life joined them.
Grade Four: The World on a Map
The approved textbook list included Mitchell’s Geographical Series, globes, school charts, and outline maps.
Imagine Lorenzo standing before one of those maps.
The teacher points to North America, then to the United States, then to Ohio and West Virginia. The two states are different colors. A dark line marks the boundary between them.
“There,” the teacher says, “is the Ohio River.”
Lorenzo knows immediately that the map is incomplete.
It cannot show how the river smells in summer. It cannot show morning fog or winter ice. It cannot reproduce the sound of water against a ferry or the feeling of approaching the opposite shore. It cannot show the precise place where a child begins in one state and arrives in another.
By his imagined fourth year, the landscape itself was changing. In June 1871, the railroad bridge system between Bellaire and Benwood opened to traffic. The enormous stone approaches and iron crossing announced a new industrial age. Lorenzo may have watched its construction or seen its trains begin to pass above the river.
Whether he ever used the railroad as part of his school journey is unknown. But its presence would have transformed the view. The river that had once been crossed chiefly by boat was becoming a corridor of iron, steam, and national commerce.
Perhaps Lorenzo studied maps of distant states while watching engineers alter the geography of his own hometown.
Grade Five: Finding His Voice
The board’s approved materials also included Kidd’s Elocution, Bullions’ Grammars, and Quackenbos’ Rhetoric.
Elocution was the art of speaking clearly and effectively. Students practiced pronunciation, emphasis, posture, and delivery. They might memorize selections and recite them before the class.
Imagine Lorenzo waiting for his turn.
His heart beats faster as another student finishes. The teacher calls his name. He walks to the front of the room, turns, and sees the faces of his classmates.
At first, his voice is too soft.
“Speak so the entire room can hear you,” the teacher says.
He begins again.
This time the words carry.
For a Black child in Reconstruction-era America, learning to speak before an audience was not merely an exercise in performance. It was preparation for citizenship in a nation still debating whether Black voices deserved to be heard at all.
Lorenzo may have learned that knowledge gave him something to say—but elocution taught him how to stand and say it.
Back in Bellaire, perhaps he recited his lesson for his family. Perhaps someone smiled and told him he sounded like a teacher, preacher, lawyer, or public speaker.
Perhaps Lorenzo stood a little taller the next morning when he crossed the river.
Grade Six: A Citizen in the Textbooks
The district’s list included Willard’s United States History, a universal history, a work on the Constitution, Sheppard’s Science of Government, and Alden’s Citizen’s Manual.
These books must have presented difficult questions for a Black student in the 1870s.
What did liberty mean?
Who counted as a citizen?
Did the promises printed in a civics book describe the country as it existed—or the country it claimed to be?
The Civil War had ended only a few years before Lorenzo entered the school. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery, except as punishment for a crime. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, declared national citizenship and equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment followed in 1870, prohibiting the denial of voting rights on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude—although practice would repeatedly betray that promise.
Lorenzo lived inside those constitutional changes.
He did not encounter Reconstruction as a finished chapter in an old history book. It was unfolding around him. Adults debated it in newspapers, meeting halls, churches, workplaces, and political gatherings. Its possibilities and limitations shaped the opportunities available to his family.
He may have read lofty sentences about equality in a classroom that existed because the public-school system remained segregated.
That contradiction should not be overlooked. Access to the same approved books was meaningful, but common textbooks did not erase the injustice of separation. Wheeling’s Colored School represented both progress and the limits imposed upon that progress.
Still, inside that unequal system, Black educators and students claimed every available lesson and made it their own.
Grade Seven: Looking Beyond the River
The approved course materials reached into science: physiology, natural philosophy, chemistry, botany, mineralogy, geology, and astronomy.
Now Lorenzo could examine the world beyond political boundaries.
A stone did not know whether it came from Ohio or West Virginia.
A star did not recognize segregation.
The human body did not change its design according to race.
The same gravity pulled upon every person crossing the river.
Perhaps science offered Lorenzo a different kind of freedom—the freedom to ask questions and seek answers through observation. He may have studied the hills surrounding the valley, the coal beneath them, the plants growing along the banks, or the night sky above the smoke.
He might have looked from Bellaire toward Wheeling after dark and identified a constellation discussed in class.
The same sky covered both cities.
The same river reflected it.
Grade Eight: The Last Crossing
We do not presently know whether Lorenzo Lucas completed eight grades in Wheeling. We do not know how long he attended, what subjects he mastered, or what profession he eventually pursued.
But let us imagine one final school morning.
He is older now. The crossing no longer frightens him. He knows when the river is rising and when fog will delay the trip. He recognizes workers, ferrymen, merchants, and conductors. He knows the streets on both sides of the water.
His books have changed over the years—from spelling and elementary readers to grammar, history, science, government, and rhetoric. The little boy who once repeated letters can now read complex passages. The child who struggled to form his name can now compose an argument. The quiet student can rise before a room and speak.
Perhaps, on his last day, he pauses before beginning the journey home.
Behind him stands the school in Wheeling.
Before him lies Bellaire.
Between them flows the river he has crossed so many times that it no longer seems like a boundary. It has become part of his education.
Lorenzo carries his books home one last time.
What the Record Really Tells Us
The imagined details of Lorenzo’s journey should never be mistaken for documented biography. We do not yet know the full story of his family, transportation, classmates, daily routine, or years of attendance.
What the surviving record proves is remarkable enough.
A Black family in Bellaire sought educational opportunity for its child across both a river and a state line. Wheeling’s superintendent carried the request to the Board of Education. Board members debated the tuition and ultimately approved Lorenzo’s admission at half the customary rate.
The record also demonstrates that Wheeling’s Colored School had developed a reputation—or offered an opportunity—significant enough to attract a family from another state.
The 1869 textbook list expands the story. The Board of Education approved an ambitious body of instructional material for the schools of the Wheeling district, including the Colored School. Students were expected to encounter spelling, reading, penmanship, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, government, rhetoric, science, and advanced mathematics.
That curriculum does not make segregation just. It does, however, tell us something important about the intellectual world Black students and teachers were building within it.
They were not preparing children merely to occupy a restricted place.
They were preparing them to read, calculate, reason, speak, question, and participate in the wider world.
More Than a River Crossing
Lorenzo Lucas’s story begins with a bureaucratic sentence: a nonresident Black youth wished to enter a school at reduced tuition.
But behind that sentence we can see a family making sacrifices, a child confronting distance, Black educators building an institution, and a public school board making a consequential decision.
Every trip from Bellaire to Wheeling would have carried Lorenzo across several boundaries at once:
From Ohio to West Virginia.
From home to school.
From unfamiliarity to knowledge.
From a nation only recently freed from slavery toward a future that remained uncertain.
We may never know exactly what Lorenzo thought as he watched the shoreline approach.
But we know why his crossing matters.
In 1868, a Black child came to the Ohio River carrying the hope of an education.
The river stood in his way.
And he crossed it.
Historical Note
Documented facts used in this narrative include:
The Wheeling Board of Education established its tax-supported Colored School in the fall of 1866.
John W. West served as its first teacher; his brother Robert West was later employed at the same school.
Board records identify Lorenzo Lucas as a Black student from Bellaire, Ohio, seeking admission to Wheeling’s Colored School.
The Wheeling Intelligencer reported on December 10, 1868, that the Board approved the admission of a nonresident Black student for $2.50 per quarter, half the usual tuition.
A Board of Education textbook report from the period lists the books and instructional materials approved for Wheeling’s schools.
The railroad crossing between Bellaire and Benwood did not open until June 21, 1871. Lorenzo’s precise transportation route remains unknown.
The eight-grade journey, ferry scenes, conversations, friendships, classroom experiences, and Lorenzo’s thoughts are interpretive reconstructions and should not be read as established biographical facts.
-T
Primary Sources
“Board of Education—Regular Meeting,” The Wheeling Intelligencer, December 10, 1868.
Wheeling Board of Education meeting records identifying Lorenzo Lucas of Bellaire, Ohio.
Wheeling Board of Education Committee on Text Books report, circa 1869.
Freedmen’s Bureau educational reporting concerning Wheeling’s Colored School and John W. West.
Additional Context
Historical terminology note: “Colored School” and “colored youth” are used when referring to the official language of the institution and the 1868 newspaper record. “Black” and “African American” are used in the modern narrative.
