the Round Tops, in
the western part of the city, near the Circle, and still later
removing to the old Western Academy building, corner of I and
Seventeenth streets. He was there till about 1830, when he was
convicted of assisting a slave to his freedom, and sent a term to the
penitentiary. Mrs. Billing had a night school in which she was greatly
assisted by Mr. Monroe, a government clerk and a Presbyterian elder,
whose devout and benevolent character is still remembered in the
churches. Mrs. Billing had scholars from Bladensburg and the
surrounding country, who came into Georgetown and boarded with her and
with others. About the time when Mrs. Billing relinquished her school
in 1822 or 1823, what may be properly called

THE SMOTHERS SCHOOL-HOUSE,

was built by Henry Smothers on the corner of Fourteenth and H streets,
not far from the Treasury building. Smothers had a small
dwelling-house on this corner, and built his school-house on the rear
of the same lot. He had been long a pupil of Mrs. Billing, and had
subsequently taught a school on Washington Street, opposite the Union
Hotel in Georgetown. He opened his school in Washington in the old
corporation school-house, built in 1806, but some years before this
period abandoned as a public school-house. It was known as the Western
Academy, and is still standing and used as a school-house on the
corner of I and Nineteenth streets, west. When his school-house on
Fourteenth and H streets was finished, his school went into the new
quarters. This school was very large, numbering always more than a
hundred and often as high as a hundred and fifty scholars. He taught
here about two years, and was succeeded by John W. Prout about the
year 1825. Prout was a man of ability. In 1831, May 4, there was a
meeting, says the "National Intelligencer" of that date, of "the
colored citizens, large and very respectable, in the African Methodist
Episcopal Church," to consider the question of emigrating to Liberia.
John W. Prout was chosen to preside over the assemblage, and the
article in the "Intelligencer" represents him as making "a speech of
decided force and well adapted to the occasion, in support of a set of
resolutions which he had drafted, and which set forth views adverse to
leaving the soil that had given them birth, their true and veritable
home, _without the benefits of education_." The school under Prout was
governed by a board of trustees and was organized as

A FREE SCHOO