Archives in Action
by Lynn Hoke, Archivist/Historian for the
Episcopal Church Women of the Diocese of North Carolina
Let’s officially declare Saturday, April 25, 2009 BISHOP TUTTLE SCHOOL DAY! On this last Saturday in April at Saint Augustine’s College the Episcopal Church Women of the Diocese of North Carolina will jointly sponsor “A Distinctive Contribution: Commemorating the Bishop Tuttle Memorial Training School.” The other sponsors are Saint Augustine’s College and the Diocesan Historiographer, the Rev. Brooks Graebner.
Memorial plaque on the outside of the ROTC buildingThe Bishop Tuttle Training School operated at Saint Augustine’s from 1925 to 1941. Today very few people in the Diocese or the Saint Augustine’s community know that the Tuttle School building remains a visible and vital part of the campus, still standing prominently near the main entrance and now housing the Army ROTC “Mighty Falcon Battalion.” In an informal survey of former students, most say they walked by the building every day for four years and never read the building’s brass name plaque: “The Bishop Tuttle Memorial Training School, Erected by the Woman’s Auxiliary to the National Council, 1925.”
The story of how the Bishop Tuttle School got started, how it fared, and how it closed is an untold chapter in our history. Plans are now well underway to rectify this oversight. Participants attending the April 25th event will gather first in historic St. Augustine’s Chapel to honor the memory of the Tuttle School, its students and faculty, with the Rt. Rev. Michael B. Curry, Bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina, preaching. Program segments in the Jones Theater will feature a historical dramatic reading using a variety of documentary sources, and a formal presentation by Dr. John Kayser, Professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver, on the place of the Tuttle School in the history of schools of Social Work. Following lunch, participants will be invited to tour the original Tuttle School building.
The ROTC program is housed in what used to be the Tuttle School buildingIn addition to his formal presentation, Dr. Kayser and Dr. Patricia N. Page, Coordinator of the Southern Episcopal Women’s History Project, will also share briefly about how they independently conducted oral history interviews with Fannie Pitt Gross Jeffrey, one of the last graduates of the Bishop Tuttle Training School. How these two both crossed paths with Fannie Jeffrey is a story in itself – one of those serendipities that played a key role in the genesis of this commemorative event. Although he has been researching and writing about the Tuttle School since 2004, Dr. Kayser will be making his first trip to Raleigh for this event in April. Thanks to a generous research grant from the Southern Episcopal Women’s History Project, he will also be able to spend some long-awaited research time in the archives of both St. Augustine’s College and the Diocese of North Carolina. If any new information about the Tuttle School surfaces he plans to incorporate it into his presentation.
“Where can a young Colored woman get training for Church work?” According to Grace Lindley, Executive Secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary from 1919 to 1940, this question began to be asked in earnest in the early 1920s: “There were Church schools for all sorts of training, industrial and academic, there were secular schools and colleges, but there was none for the training of women Church workers of the Negro race. There was little doubt that such a school ought to be, and resolutions urging this were passed by the Synods of the Washington and Sewanee Provinces. Then the Woman’s Auxiliary said that there should be such a school, and set itself to gathering the funds for it. The Conference of Colored People decided that they would try to give $5,000 toward it.” Thus begins the story of the Bishop Tuttle Memorial Training School, an idea whose time had come.
Faculty and students of the Tuttle Training School on the steps of Tuttle HouseIn 1922, contingent on funding, the Presiding Bishop and Council approved the Department of Missions plan for what was then called a Training School for Colored Deaconesses and Social and Parish Workers. Funding began to materialize that same year after the Woman’s Auxiliary authorized a three-year “Special” at the Triennial Meeting in Portland. This Special’s original goal was $75,000, $65,000 of which was for a house in New York where foreign and domestic missionaries and volunteers could stay while on furlough or for training opportunities. The remaining $10,000 was to be used for the establishment of a national school for colored women workers.
Naming rights then, as now, apparently went with the money. Following the death of Presiding Bishop Daniel Sylvester Tuttle in April 1923, the Woman’s Auxiliary Executive Board voted unanimously to make this Special a memorial “to our late beloved Presiding Bishop.” The house in New York then became Windham House, after Bishop Tuttle’s birthplace in Windham, New York, and the school for colored women workers became the Bishop Tuttle Memorial Training School.
Faculty of the Tuttle Training School – Dean Bertha Richards stands second from leftDocuments in the Tuttle School Collection at the Archives of the Episcopal Church show that the cost of the school far exceeded the original $10,000 figure, but so did receipts from the Auxiliary’s Special. In May 1925, Howard E. Satterfield, a prominent Raleigh contractor, signed a four-page agreement with the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America for the building on the St. Augustine’s School campus. Following a detailed list of external and internal specifications, Satterfield added this note, “It is understood and intended that the whole job shall be first class in every respect and is expected to meet the full approval of the owners.” The agreement was not to exceed the cost of $28,850.00, and the work was completed by December 1925 at a cost of $26,222.04. At an Epiphany dedicatory service in 1926, Satterfield handed over the building to Miss Grace Lindley of New York, who in turn presented it to the Board of Trustees of St. Augustine’s School.
After building the school, the Woman’s Auxiliary fully funded its on-going operation through the United Thank Offering and donations. The Spirit of Missions from June 1927 features a detailed description of Tuttle House, followed by Grace Lindley’s explanation of exactly how much it would cost an Auxiliary branch or other group to undertake “the upkeep” of a room. She also acknowledges the donors of several rooms given as memorials and thankofferings: the living room by the Diocese of Massachusetts for Miss Jennie McIntosh; the dining room by the Diocese of New York for Bishop Greer; the oratory by the Colored clergy of the Diocese of Newark as a thankoffering for Bishop Lines; the kitchen, pantry, and a student’s room by St. Thomas’ Auxiliary, New York City for Bishop Stires; the director’s office by the Diocese of Newark; the Dean’s bedroom and sitting room by Miss Richards herself, and friends; one classroom by the Kentucky branch for a Colored clergyman, the Rev. H. F. Percival; a student’s room for Dr. and Mrs. Henry Lubeck by Miss Eva Putney, and a student’s room by the diocese of Long Island.
Massachusetts Room in Tuttle House – Living room furnished by the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Diocese of Massachusetts as a memorial for Miss Jennie McIntoshThe Bishop Tuttle School’s first and only Dean was Bertha Richards, an active churchwoman from New Jersey who chose St. Augustine’s as her place to serve the Church. After eight years as the librarian, she went on to serve as Dean during the Tuttle School’s sixteen years of operation.
More than sixty graduates went out from the Bishop Tuttle School to a variety of positions. A few joined the National Woman’s Auxiliary as field workers or took appointments under the United Thank Offering. Some worked in Episcopal parishes that had schools and social programs. The majority took positions in various social service agencies, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration during the Depression. Because a good number of them wrote back to Bertha Richards, we can get a good sense of their work situations and experiences on the job. Excerpts from some of their letters will be incorporated into the dramatic reading portion of the program.
Students of the Bishop Tuttle Training SchoolIn his Annual Report for 1934, the Rev. Edgar H. Goold, President of St. Augustine’s College, told his own Board of Trustees and the Diocesan Convention, “Our Church is the first and only Church to provide such an opportunity for training so that this school is widely recognized as being a distinctive contribution of our Episcopal Church to the needs and development of the Negro people.”
Telling the Bishop Tuttle School story is long overdue. All interested persons are invited to attend this special commemorative event in the life and history of the Church. Additional historical information is available on this website – please see the sidebar to the left. If you have questions please contact Lynn Hoke, ECW Archivist/Historian at archives^ecw-nc#org or by mail at The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, 200 W. Morgan St., Suite 300, Raleigh, NC 27601. Also, if you have information about former Tuttle School students or faculty, please contact Lynn Hoke.