It is positive that the fathers of the Revolution would not have been successful but for the women, perhaps uneducated in books but competent and self-sacrificing in maintaining the home, while the men were fighting for liberty and free exercise of all its enjoyments. If this great nation is a testimonial of what women without the aid of books contributed in laying the foundation, what must now be expected of women having every advantage of education from kindergarten and primary schools to the woman's college?
I might mention sixteen colleges now exclusively devoted to the education of young women in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Illinois with a roll of eight thousand young women students.
The first seniority is Mount Holyoke, Mass., founded in 1837, having 755 scholars; the largest is Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 1,620 young women; next Wellesley, Mass., 1,375, and Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1,125. To show the difference between now and the days of our revolutionary fathers, the school houses were built of logs, one story high, with bark roofs and puncheon or dirt floors, which on account of incessant tramping usually became covered several inches deep with dust. The teacher sat in the center of the room.
In the log walls around were driven wooden pegs upon which were laid boards that formed the desks. The seats were rough stools or logs. All sat with backs to the teacher. The windows to admit light were fitted with white paper greased with lard instead of glass. The boy scholars wore leather or dried skin aprons and buckskin tunics and leggins, when they could not get woven materials. And the girls, coarsely woven flax or wool bodices, skirts, kerchiefs, and aprons and footwear of wood, coarse leather, not a few going barefoot.
The writing equipment in Revolutionary days consisted of ink which was of home manufacture from an ink powder, quills and a pen knife, cutting pens from goose quills being an art. The rest of the materials were paper, pumice, a rule, wax, and black sand, shaken from a pepper box arrangement, instead of blotting paper.
The earliest method of teaching before school text-books were known was by what was termed the hornbook, a tablet of wood about 5 by 2 inches upon which was fastened a paper sheet containing the alphabet in capitals and small letters across the top and simple syllables like, ab, ad, etc.; below and underneath the whole the Lord's Prayer. The paper containing this course of study was covered with a sheet of transparent horn fastened around the edges. At the lower edge was a small handle with a hole through it and a string to go around the neck. By this means the advantages of a colonial education stayed by the scholars if they wished to avail of them or not.
These hornbooks were made of oak, bound with metal for common folks, but for the rich of iron and metal, often silver. Some were wrought in silk needle work. Their popularity is shown by their advertisement for sale in the Pennsylvania Gazette, December, 1760, and New York Gazette, May, the same year. Battledore book was another name. Another style was the printed cardboard battledore, about fifteen inches long and folded over like a pocket book.
The primer succeeded the hornbooks, the New England Primer being one of the earliest. It is recorded that three millions of these were sold, so great was the desire for education in times preceding the Revolution. These little books were five by three inches and contained 80 pages. They gave short tables of easy spelling up to six syllables; also some alphabetical religion in verse, as
K—for King Charles the good,
No man of blood.
In the Revolutionary days this was transposed to