s. He called to his assistance well-equipped teachers and
succeeded in offering to the Negroes of that city practically the same
course of study taught in the white high school, though at times some
classes were too small to justify instruction in certain phases of
specialized work.[18]

BLAZING THE WAY IN THE CENTRAL COUNTIES

A more extensive movement for the education of the Negroes was taking
place during these years in the central part of West Virginia,
following the line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the New and
Kanawha Rivers. This work did not arouse equal interest in all of the
counties along these routes, but in Greenbrier, Monroe, Summers,
Fayette, Kanawha, Cabell and Mason Counties, reached a point of
development deserving mention. It can be readily observed that this
progress in education resulted largely from the early settlements of
Negroes in the east-central counties of the State and from the influx
of Negro laborers into the New and the Kanawha valleys to work on the
salt works, and later from the migration of Negroes to the coal mines
opened along the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Kanawha and Michigan
Railroads. Negro schools, with such few exceptions as those at
Marshes, in Raleigh County, at Madison and Uneeda in Boone County, at
Red Sulphur Springs in Monroe County, and at Fayetteville in Fayette
County, were unsuccessful when removed from those important
thoroughfares.

The earliest teaching of the Negroes in the east-central counties of
the State came as a result of the sympathetic interests of benevolent
slaveholders who, living in a part of a State with a natural endowment
unfavorable to the institution of slavery, failed as a whole to follow
the fortunes of the slaveholders near the Atlantic Coast, and, hoping
to see the ultimate extinction of the institution by gradual
emancipation, gave the Negroes an opportunity for such preparation as
they would need to discharge the functions of citizenship. Immediately
after the War, when there was no public opinion proscribing such
benevolence, sympathetic white persons privately instructed Negroes
here and there. Such was the case at White Sulphur, long since known
as a summer resort, attracting from afar persons of aristocratic
bearing who, coming into contact with the Negro servants whom the
resort required, not only proved helpful to them by way of contact,
but gave them assistance in realizing limited educational aspirations.
The priva