"... I have recollected your request for a pair of globes, therefore I have wrote to Mr. Grubb to ship a pair of the best 18 inch, with caps, and a book of directions, and to add a case of neat instruments, and one dozen Middleton's best pencils marked M. L. When you are measuring the surface of the globe remember you are to cut a part in it, and think of a plum pudding and other domestic duties. Your father,
"Henry Laurens."
Still lead pencils were not in common use even in city schools till this century. The manuscript arithmetics or "sum-books" which I have seen were always done in ink. Many a country boy grew to manhood without ever seeing a lead pencil.
Samuel Pemberton, Twelve Years Old, 1736
In country schools even till the middle of this century copy-books were made of foolscap paper carefully sewed into book shape, and were ruled by hand. For this children used lead plummets instead of pencils. These plummets were made of lead melted and cast in wooden moulds cut out by the ever ready jackknife and were then tied by a hempen string to the ruler. These plummets were usually shaped like a tomahawk, and carefully whittled and trimmed to a sharp edge. Slightly varied shapes were a carpenter's or a woodcutter's axe; also there were cannon, battledores, and cylinders.
Paper was scarce and too highly prized for children to waste; it was a great burden even to ministers to get what paper they needed for their sermons, and they frequently acquired microscopic hand-writing for economy's sake. To the forest the scholars turned for the ever plentiful birch bark, which formed a delightful substitute to cipher on instead of paper. Among the thrifty Scotch-Irish settlers in New Hampshire and the planters in Maine, sets of arithmetic rules were copied by each child on birch bark and made a substantial text-book. Rolls of birch bark resembling in shape the parchment rolls of the Egyptians and lead plummets seem too ancient in appearance to have been commonly employed in schools within a century in this country.
It has been asserted that school slates were not used till this century. Noah Webster says distinctly in a letter written about the schools of his childhood, that "before the Revolution and for some years after no slates were used in common schools." S. Town, attending school in Belchertown, Massachusetts, in 1785, says that slates were unknown.
I have seen but a single reference to them in America and that is in such an ingenuous schoolboy's letter I will quote it in full:—
"To Mr. Cornelius Ten Broeck
att Albany.
"Stamford, the 13th Day of October, 1752.
"Honored Fethar,
"These fiew Lines comes to let you know that I am in a good State of Health and I hope this may find you also. I have found all the things in my trunk but I must have a pare of Schuse. And mama please to send me some Ches Nutts and some Wall Nutts; you please to send me a Slate, and som pensals, and please to send me some smok befe, and for bringing my trunk 3⁄9, and for a pare of Schuse 9 shillings. You please to send me a pare of indin's Schuse, You please to send me som dride corn. My Duty to Father and Mother and Sister and to all frinds.
"I am your Dutyfull Son,
"John Ten Broeck.
"Father forgot to send me my Schuse."