thirty
pupils under the direction of Miss Joe Gee. For her time she was
well-prepared woman, using up-to-date methods, and was very successful
in the work there for two and one-half years, at the expiration of
which she married. Her successful work was due in no small measure to
the cooperation of Mrs. Mary Rector, Mrs. Phyllis Henderson, Mr. Fred
Siren, Jr., and Mrs. Harriet Beckwith. They did not own the school
property, but conducted the work in a one-room ramshackled structure.
Another group of ambitious Negroes established a school at Glen Falls,
in the same county, in 1872, with Noe Johnson as the teacher.

Steps were soon taken to provide better educational facilities for
Negroes in Clarksburg. On July 15, 1868, the Board of Education of
that city accepted a bid of $1,147 to erect a one-story brick building
to be used as a Negro school-house. This structure was completed and
occupied by the end of the school year 1870. After the school had been
better housed, the work was professionally organized and thereafter
intelligently supervised to standardize instruction.

In the beginning of this new day the schools were successful in having
a number of popular principals to serve them efficiently. Among these
may be mentioned Charles Ankrum, a pioneer teacher, who was principal
of the school from 1870 to 1873, J. A. Riley, a man of the same type
serving from 1873-1874, G. F. Jones, a man of little more preparation
than that of his predecessors, from 1874 to 1876, W. B. Jones, an
honest worker, from 1876-1878, and M. W. Grayson, who served the
system well from 1878 to 1889, doing much to lay the foundation upon
which others built thereafter.[11]

The first Negro principal at Clarksburg, with extensive preparation as
judged by the standards of today, was J. S. Williams, a graduate of
Morgan College, who was the head of this school from 1889 to 1891. Mr.
C. W. Boyd, a normal school graduate of Wilberforce University, served
the system one year, that is, from 1891 to 1892, after which he became
a teacher in the Charleston Negro Public Schools of which he is now
the head. Then came Mr. Sherman H. Guss, the first Negro to receive a
degree from Ohio State University. He made a special study of the
needs of the school, forcefully presented them to the educational
authorities, enlarged the school's facilities, and developed there a
high school which ranks today as one of the best in the State. In 1901
Mr. Guss resigned to bec