The Lost Legacy of Lizzie Scoville
THE LOST LEGACY OF LIZZIE SCOVILLE
PART I: Thoroughly Loyal to the Mountain People
By Nina Alvarez
This is the true story of a daughter of Laurel County, Kentucky, one Elizabeth Scoville, whose legacy was once so notable that her obituary in 1957 described her as "one of the best known educational figures in Eastern and Southeastern Kentucky." She was so popular, in fact, they’d even named a town after her in Owsley County back in 1916.
Today, all that is left of Scoville’s legacy is a tiny ancillary record in the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, typed up in the 1930s, the details starting to smudge and fade even while Elizabeth was still alive.
I started my research in 2021 with all the modern resources, but fifty or sixty years ago, Elizabeth’s nephew (my great-uncle Alfred Duluth Jones) traveled town to town, visiting her old Kentucky haunts and interviewing people about her; that's how interesting she was. And that’s where her legacy lived on, with the people she taught, most of whom have long since passed. I don't know what happened to those interviews. I just learned about them last year. And Uncle Doodle, as my dad and his siblings called Alfred Duluth, passed away over twenty years ago.
But it goes to show that I’m not the first person who learned about Elizabeth’s life and tried to salvage it.
It’s a story worth salvaging.
Let’s begin.
Elizabeth Jeanette Scoville was born in 1878 in Raccoon Springs, Kentucky to Thomas Sheldon Scoville and Paulina Pigg Scoville. Raccoon Springs was once a busy waystation along the trace that Daniel Boone had marked out about a hundred years prior. “From the Evan's place the trace did proceed northwest "up the hill," where an unpaved road exists today. This road, like the old trace, follows the ridge past the old Dalton and Scoville places, then descends to Little Raccoon Creek at the William Feltner farm”1 an old book on Laurel County tells us.
Elizabeth was raised in a family that clearly valued community engagement and education. Her grandfather had been regionally famous Union Captain H. H. Scoville. You used to be able to go see a tribute to him at Levi Jackson State Park in London, Kentucky before it was stolen. An uncle on her father's side was the town sheriff and an uncle on her mother's side was a judge. Her older brother, Hector, would become a clerk for the United States Supreme Court in Puerto Rico in its first years as a U.S. territory, an active organizer for the fruit farm trade between P.R. and the U.S., and eventually run for governor of Puerto Rico in 1926. One of her younger sisters, Magnolia, would have a long career as a school administrator with a masters from Columbia, traveling the country to speak on women’s issues.
So I want to impress the point here that although their grandfather and uncles were prominent in the community, there was something particularly broad-minded to that Scoville household and those siblings, and the name Scoville would continue to mean something in those parts for a long time. There is a Laurel County-born woman, another one of Elizabeth’s great-great-grandnieces, who was named after her. There are obviously Scovilles out there who keep Aunt Lizzie alive in their own way and have knowledge I do not have.
I am somewhat of an outsider writing this. I was raised in Rochester, New York. My dad’s side of the family is from Puerto Rico by way of London, Kentucky, thanks to the influence of Hector. My great-great grandmother was Amelia Frances Scoville, Elizabeth’s oldest sister. But I don’t know the family stories about Elizabeth except for one my grandmother Betty Raymer Jones related to me, and I kid you not, it’s about Elizabeth kicking up her leg in defiance of being told she was too old to teach and saying that they could “kiss her star.” Most of what I share here is me pulling from the public record and trying to make Elizabeth’s legacy available to a wider audience.
Elizabeth started teaching young, in her teens I believe, as was common back then in the late 1800s. She came of age around the turn of the century, a time when there weren’t a lot of careers for women. Many school teachers were farmers' daughters and worked only until they were married. But Aunt Lizzie really did love her vocation, and she dedicated her life to it. She eventually attended Eastern Kentucky Normal School (today Eastern Kentucky University). “Normal schools” were what they called teacher training colleges in those days.
Larger forces at work play a factor here in Elizabeth’s next steps. She happened to attend The Eastern Kentucky Normal School at a time when it had recently developed a new department called School Improvement and Hygiene. At the turn of the twentieth century, only 51% of children went to school. The schoolhouses that did exist were one-room affairs, where all grades sat together with one poor and harried teacher. Sometimes the district trustees and board members themselves were illiterate. And those schoolhouses of old, so easy to romanticize, were actually often unsafe and unsanitary, with wind blowing through the slats and only a little coal to warm the whole room. Sickness spread quickly under those conditions. In the late 1800s, a strong urge for educational reform had sprung up, specifically focused on getting more kids to school and bettering the conditions of those rooms.
But improved schools meant increased taxes on already very poor miners and farmers in the Eastern Coalfields of Kentucky. Life was already very hard, especially in those mountains. People felt they didn’t have extra money to be sending other people’s kids to school. They pushed back.
And so a reform called the "Whirlwind Campaign" was devised by the state legislature. It utilized the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs, led by women of means, and which was obviously very socially influential. They worked as the arm of the state to change hearts and minds resistant to centralized systems of governance.
One of their specific aims was to consolidate schools, combining several one-room schoolhouses into one school and then dividing them up by grade, the way we do today. These are called “graded schools.”
An award of $800 was offered to the school that most met its model requirements:
two classrooms
an annex room
at least two teachers
clean, comfortable, with proper ventilation, heating, water supply
garden
playground
desks
maps
books
a good blackboard
maps
library
The simplicity of these minimum requirements gives you a sense of how barebones the standards had been prior.
The Women's Federation knew they were facing great resistance, so they brought esteemed child psychologist Dr. Amy Tanner around to give talks. One of those visits was to a small and very poor community way up in the hills of Owsley County. That trip must have taken days on horseback through winding mountain passages, but when she arrived, she must have said the right things to those farmers and coal miners, because she was able to rouse enthusiasm and passion enough to spark a focused effort after she left. I’m guessing she made an appeal to the mothers especially for their children’s welfare. It used to be that a sickness could pass through a community, leading more than one child to an early grave. Graded schools meant better school conditions meant better hygiene and fewer children in the room together. And yes, better schools meant improvements to the community socially and economically, though that was more of a long-term investment.
Though some of the men were against it, a community in Owsley decided to try for that $800 prize.
They created a plan. It would be located near Buck Creek.
The building would have a main floor, a basement floor, and a stone foundation. The four rooms on the main floor would be classrooms. One of the basement rooms would be used for coal and a furnace, one for manual training for the boys (what we would today call “shop class”) and the other two for playrooms: one for the girls and one for the boys.
A stable would be built in the rear for the horses and mules that many children rode to school.
As well, a cottage was built nearby for the principal and teachers to live in. One of the rooms would be outfitted for domestic science for the girls (what we would call “home economics”). This addition was wise. The School Improvement League was trying to better the lives of teachers, not just students. One of the schools who applied for the $800 prize admitted they had no janitor and didn’t plan to hire one. It was apparently enough that every day the teacher “sweeps the house clean.” The committee made a point of making it known that “a teacher who is worth her teacher’s salary is far too expensive a person to do janitor service.”
In 1909, $800 was equivalent in purchasing power to about $27,000 in 2024. Obviously not enough to build a school and a cottage, even in a low-income area. The $800 was more like seed money. It would be used to furnish the school building and manual training room at the Buck Creek School, should they win the prize. But most of the resources, it is clear, had to come from the community itself. From raised taxes and from donated labor and materials.
While all this was underway, Aunt Lizzie was earning her Life Degree in teaching from Eastern Kentucky in Richmond, a school that had been established so recently, she was only in its second graduating class. She was also teaching in Clay County. It was a time when teachers lived in their schoolhouses like they were dorms. They kept them up and kept them clean.
We are lucky enough to get a little color from her life there in a newspaper notice that told of her and another teacher occupying vacant rooms in the school building that were being papered, calsomined, and painted, and how they had recently “given a very delightful Hallowe’en party to their friends.”2 One of many ways I find Lizzie to be a kindred spirit.
In some ways, Elizabeth was at the right place at the right time. But she was also the right person for the job. She was part of a rather small cohort of newly trained teachers from the very college in Richmond that had spearheaded the academic force behind school improvements, so she was well-connected. But her yearbook describes her as “never idle, thrifty, and thoughtful of others” and quotes “all that she ever hopes to give, is service to the mountains as long as she lives.” Just the qualities needed to build a school and win over a poor community trusting you with their taxes and children.
As you may have guessed, Owsley won the $800 prize. Certainly they went above and beyond with a plan for a five-classroom schoolhouse and separate cottage for the teachers. But, being the smallest and poorest county in the state, they may also have won in part because the Federation wanted to make a point that if their reforms can succeed there, they can succeed anywhere.
Lizzie was plucked by someone at Richmond who knew her and trusted her to oversee the fledgling project. There was a lot riding on her shoulders. She would have to prove that graded schools were worth the investment.
What happened next in that county in 1909 was significant. They voted to tax themselves "to the limit of the law" to help fund the schoolhouse. An additional $600 was donated. Of the school ground’s seven acres, three were gifted. Stone for the building was offered at the cost of quarrying, and the coal under 100 acres adjoining the school was deeded to the school for as long as it would last. Many local men and boys came to help clear off the land and aid in building for free, lessening the cost of labor.
And they brought one Miss Elizabeth Scoville on as principal to oversee it all.
Act I: Thoroughly Loyal to the Mountain People
Anyone who’s done this kind of digging in the past knows that, whether you can trust it or not, a narrative starts forming in your mind. It’s big like a movie sometimes. At others, it’s a small, folksy scene like the first act of a certain type of stage play. It comes from a combination of the articles you read and the movies you’ve seen, the collective unconscious, and a wild sense that you are feeling into the past itself, that something mystical is going on. Whether that communion is real or just imaginary, it’s this wonder that brings me back to ancestry.com and newspapers.com archives month after month, year after year, looking not only into Lizzie’s life, but the lives of many others whose stories, once painted in such vivid terms in the papers, are now barely legible.
So, with my storyteller’s eye, I see this season of Elizabeth’s life as one of glory. I can feel it because I have the same flavor of industry in me. The idea of building a school sounds delicious to me. And because of books like Anne of Green Gables, there is an image of the pastoral, Gilded-age schoolhouse I can reference. And because of all the old movies about small towns that come together for the greater good, that trope rises into my perspective, I can’t help it. So this season on Elizabeth’s life is the first act of a three-act play that exists only in my mind. The “happy village” scene it’s called in Disney parlance.
They have, at start, only fifteen volumes in their library, but the plan is to have ice cream socials to raise money to buy more books.
There are rooms to decorate, gardens to plant, materials to ship in, wood to cut and haul, teachers to train, lessons to prepare, and people to visit to convince them to release their kids from farmwork and send them to school instead.
Elizabeth oversees all of it at thirty years old as the first principal of the first consolidated rural free school in Kentucky.
As far away as Lexington they are talking about it in the papers:
“Miss Scoville, who is thoroughly loyal to the mountain people and believes that all they need to take the lead in education is an opportunity for these people; they are simply carried away with the work of their model school. Men who were against it in the beginning before they really understood what it meant, now say they were in the wrong, and are lending their efforts to extend the usefulness of the school.”3
Two other Laurel County women are the first to join Elizabeth as teachers at that new school in Owsley: Ida Probst, a graduate of Sue Bennett Memorial School, a private college in London, Kentucky; and Emily Dyche, also of Sue Bennett, and of the Dyche family who ran the London Sentinel and whose patriarch A.R. Dyche established my favorite colorful old Laurel resource: its very first newspaper The Mountain Echo. It’s in his namesake, the A.R. Dyche Cemetery, where many Scovilles, including Elizabeth, would find their final resting place.4
So, Elizabeth and her hometown cohort got to work. According to the Lexington Herald:
“The young ladies have worked heroically, almost day and night, organizing and grading, introducing elementary domestic science and model classwork, assisting pupils and patrons in laying out and beautiful the grounds, building and equipping a cottage home for the teachers, organizing and conducting mothers’ and pupils’ clubs for improvement, and in many other ways building up the school to touch every interest in the community.”5
It seems Elizabeth had a knack for community building, especially in Owsley. She spread the word far and wide about consolidating schools and investing in educational reform. The was awarded a “gavel” for bringing into the Federation the largest number of clubs. That means Elizabeth recruited more women to the women’s clubs during that time period than anyone else, despite being in a lowly populated area bounded by rising creeks.
It is this article below from the Courier Journal in 1911 that first appeared when I began my newspaper search for her, and it is forever, to me, the visual summation of this auspicious time in her life.
Elizabeth must have believed body and soul in the women’s groups, because she was also very good at convincing others to join. Women’s clubs would also be an important part of her sister Magnolia’s life work over in Bowling Green. The clubs have empowered women to protect libraries, reform schools, protect the environment, teach women how to join the workforce, fight for women’s suffrage, and whatever civic and community concerns were on their minds.
The context here is notable. The article says that the work was “all the more wonderful” because Elizabeth did this in the smallest county in the state where nearly all travel is by mule or wagon.
“She put us all to shame by saying she would have done more had the creeks not been so high as to make travel impossible.”
Mountain Work: Social Uplift or Social Control?
There is a name for this movement Elizabeth was a part of: “Mountain Work.” Elizabeth was often referred to as a "mountain girl" in early articles about the Buck Creek School. We see this need to insist that these were local girls, mountain girls doing mountain work, probably emphasized in response to pushback about the idea of outsiders coming in to "reform" the mountain people.
But Elizabeth was, let’s be honest, a little different from the people she was serving, mostly because she was educated and middle class. She was a member of the Missionary Generation, the cohort born between 1860 and 1882, a generation of idealists. She was also a “New Woman.” The New Woman was a new species: college-educated, middle class, and seeking personal fulfillment in the form of philanthropy or paid work. And so being at the forefront of this new frontier of education reform must have been very exciting for her.
But critics of the Progressive Era reformers characterized Mountain Work, powerfully exemplified by the arm of the womens clubs in these backwaters, as a type of maternalism. "Ideologies that exalted women's capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values of care, nurturance, and morality.” They say it was culled from middle class Victorian drawing rooms and one scholar characterized the "female reformers" as “agents in a century-long effort to modernize and exploit Appalachia, interventionists who selectively shaped and interpreted its culture in accordance with their own presumptions and biases."
It was powerful, after all. Reform means to “re-form” and that social molding does require a kind of social influence that should be critically assessed. And indeed I imagine that Elizabeth and her siblings came from one of those middle class Victorian drawing rooms with quiet afternoons of books and rousing evenings of lively debate, much like the March sisters of Little Women. They probably also had farm chores to do. But four of the nine siblings did go into higher education, and I believe that love of learning must have started at home. And maybe it’s the kind of thing that everyone needs to be raised on to reach their potential, and maybe it’s not.
These are complicated questions. See, at the same time in Puerto Rico, Lizzie’s brother Hector was buying up fruit farms and utilizing his government connections and knowledge of the law to help establish the fruit trade between Puerto Rico and the Continental U.S. His efforts could be seen as helpful to Puerto Ricans, self-serving, or serving the ideals of the powerful nation that sent him there. Or all three.
Both Elizabeth and Hector’s destinies were shaped by their own schooling and the ways that the national, state, and local interests entangled, opening up opportunities for those prepared for them. And yet it has never been interesting to me to judge a person’s life solely by the larger forces ast play in their decision making. We each navigate this stream through intuition, desire, and an ongoing conversation with life itself. We often have contradictory feelings about much of what we do, and we voyage always into an unknown future. All we can do is try to make a difference according to our better angels. The rest is out of our hands.
What I sense deeply is that Elizabeth had a calling. It was a noble one. She saw poverty, she saw disease and distress and she felt she could help. She loved to teach, especially Manual Training, which is hands-on demonstrations. The things she was teaching those mountain kids would serve them. And the formation of the women’s groups was not a top-down power structure. Those women were mountain women with children and kin they loved and cared for. They must have felt an urgency to prepare them for survival in a country that was evolving fast just outside of their hills.
And Elizabeth was in the middle of all of it.
Never Idle a Moment, But Thrifty and Thoughtful of Others
This is Elizabeth’s page in the 1910 Eastern State Normal School yearbook, the Bluemont. We’re so incredibly lucky to happen to have this artifact because Eastern State Normal didn't have another yearbook until 1922.
She was already running the Buck Creek School at this time while finishing up her degree. She must have come back for classes in the summertime overjoyed with and preoccupied by her “school in the mountains.”
In 1911, Elizabeth was asked to join the President of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, Elise Clay Bennett Smith, and Esther Burnam Bennett to travel by horse through seven counties organizing more women's clubs and spreading the cause of consolidated schools.7 Both women would later become noted suffragists. I do not know what that journey was like, but I suppose it was probably life changing. And the story goes that Aunt Lizzie rode a big red mare.8
For six years, Elizabeth helped the Buck Creek School thrive. The papers, especially The Citizen out of Berea, a nearby progressive college town, are full of lovely little tidbits of life at the school during that time.
And there were trying times, like when the whooping cough raged in a nearby district and several parents took their children out of school temporarily because of it. Or when the grippe (the flu) would pass through the community.
At one point, a trained nurse came to the school to give a talk on tuberculosis. It had caused so many deaths, including some in Elizabeth’s own family: her father and her sister-in-law just a year apart back in 1904 and 1905 and her nephew, Hector’s son, would die of the disease in 1928 at only twenty-three years old. Those are the background tragedies everyone was just living with back then. It’s hard to imagine how fragile life must have felt, and how hardy the spirit had to be. Maybe we got a small taste of it during the pandemic.
Luckily, Elizabeth came from hardy stock; none of her siblings died in infancy and most would live to over seventy.
For fifty of those years, Elizabeth would teach or try to teach. Sometimes her efforts would be rewarded, other times she would meet with obstacles.
The Search for Scoville
Elizabeth lived for years with the other Buck Creek teachers in the cottage that had been built for them on what would later be called Scoville’s Ridge.
At some point between 1915 and 1916, the newspapers started calling the little town she lived in “Scoville” and her little school “the Scoville School.” There are no town records of this change happening however. The Owsley public records are woefully inadequate, perhaps because the County Courthouse burned down in 1929.
But the naming of the town after Elizabeth definitely happened. To this day, if you look for Scoville, Kentucky on a map, there it is with Buck Creek running through it.
The strange thing is no one seems to know much more about it. I suppose it wasn’t as easy to track these things then as it is today. But it would have been nice if someone had made a plaque or something.
Even after receiving help from the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (and they were wonderful) all they could find on Scoville, Kentucky’s naming is this. From the librarian’s email:
I did a little more digging on where the name Scoville came from. Via Morehead State University, I found Owsley County – Place names, I was able to see that Scoville had been named Posey at one point then a woman named Lizzie Scoville came there to start a mission school called Scoville high school in the early 20th century. The link will lead you to the entire document of Owsley County – place names. The attachment is the pages talking about Scoville/Posey only. Hope this helps.
So what all this muck says is that in 1909 the place was called Posey, and indeed in the papers, the local news of the school was listed as Posey news. By 1915, the papers were calling it Scoville.
You can see here in these side-by-side newspaper clippings, that the Buck Creek School news is shared under Posey news until 1916 when it is shared under Scoville news. The school didn’t change its location, so the location must have changed its name.
But the same year that her town changed its name to Scoville, Scoville herself stopped teaching at the Buck Creek school and became a principal of a school in Jessamine County, in the bluegrass part of the state.
What the superstitious part of me believes is that Elizabeth may have cursed herself when she said, “All that she ever hopes to give, is service to the mountains as long as she lives.” Because the legacy she built in the mountains seems to have been almost blessed. And as soon as she left the mountains, it began to fade almost immediately, and trouble began.
Why did Lizzie leave her namesake town? And what happened next?
Find out in the next installment: Part II: A Petition in Equity
2 The Citizen, Berea, Kentucky • Thu, Nov 28, 1907 Page 8
3 The Lexington Herald, Lexington, Kentucky • Sun, Apr 3, 1910 Page 6
4 And to indulge all the connections even further, Sue Bennett College would eventually have a natatorium named after Hector Scoville, Lizzie’s older brother, one of its first graduates). Many of Laurel’s children, I believe, must have had their destinies shaped for larger things by the building of the Sue Bennett Memorial School in 1897.
5 The Lexington Herald, Lexington, Kentucky • Sun, Apr 3, 1910 Page 6
6 The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky • Fri, May 5, 1911 Page 5
7 The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky • Fri, May 5, 191 1 Page 58 In 2003, Kentucky Living published an interview with a then-seventeen-year old Elizabeth Scoville, a straight-A student who wanted to become a doctor. She and I are two of Elizabeth’s great-great grandnieces.
9 The Citizen Berea, Kentucky • Thu, Dec 28, 1911 Page 8
10 The Courier-Journal Louisville, Kentucky • Fri, Mar 28, 1913 Page 6
