John Surratt Jr. as a teacher

[Dave Taylor]

I was saving this article to post on BoothieBarn, but it is definitely more fitting to the conversation here. This is an article written in 1919 by "The Rambler" a correspondent for the Washington Sunday Star who enjoyed writing about the old families and places around Washington, Maryland, and Virginia. The article talks about the Rambler's visit to the old site of John Surratt's school. The whole article is lengthy and I won't post it all, but you can read it here. Here is a small excerpt from it though:

"The site of the Upper School, in which John Surratt taught, and a considerable acreage around it is now the property of Morgan H. Beach, whose home is on the Rockville pike near Montrose. A few hundred yards west of the site of the school and on the south side of School House lane is an old frame house set in a shady garden where grow fine old boxwood trace, a giant British yew tree, one of those trees bearing large panicles of blue flowers and which is called "the pride of China" or the "Empress of China" tree, an ash, a willow and a tree locally called "Illinois locust." There are tubs full of gat petunias and circles and beds of many other flowers. By the side of the house is a vegetable garden, where nearly all the vegetables that can be raised in this climate are growing. This is now the home of Conrad Franklin Maught and his sister, Miss Lucinda. Here it was that John Surratt boarded while a teacher at the "Upper School," and Mr. Maught was one of his pupils...

...Mr. Maught has a very clear remembrance of John Surratt, and says he was a good teacher, a good man, and is affectionately remembered by all the people who took their lessons under his guidance and who are still living. The first teacher at that school, so far as Maught can remember, was one whose name was Mounts. Another was Thomas Harris, one was Luther Claggett and another William Keefe. Mounts returned to this school, and, if the Rambler is reading his notes straight, he succeeded John Surratt, Miss Blanche Braddock taught at this school, and she is now a teacher in a school at or near Glen Echo. The last teacher at that school was Miss Beulah Dove, who is now living at Rockville."