A dedicated teacher for many decades in Mathews County, Alex N. Lewis, while obviously much respected in his day, has nearly vanished from local memory.

Instrumental in establishing the Thomas Hunter Training School as a central educational facility for African-American students, Lewis spoke at, and wrote about, its cornerstone laying held Sept. 6, 1926.

He was a member of the Mathews Educational League, formed in 1923, which raised money for the purpose. At the cornerstone ceremony, he pointed out, “We have raised among ourselves including the $200 given us by the white people of the county, $6,500 in three years. This amount does not include a donation of $500 given us in July by the county school board.”

Lewis continued, “We wish to thank you, one and all, for the support you have given and for the sacrifice you have made and are making in order that the League may put over the job on schedule time.”

According to minutes of the Mathews County School Board, available online through the county’s school website, Thomas Hunter School opened in 1927.

Lewis, the man and teacher

The public record, including census records, death and marriage certificates, deeds, a will, and other documents, draw the picture of a young man who worked diligently and grew old and died in service to the education of the children of his race.

Alexander Nathaniel Lewis lived and worked in the days of “separate but equal” when school facilities and almost all other aspects of everyday life in Virginia were strictly segregated by race. Conditions, however, were nothing close to equal. In 1930, the school board said white schools would run 180 days, and schools for black children, 160 days.
Even worse was disparity in pay. In 1923, white teachers, depending on what type of certificate they held, made either $55 or $60 a month. The black teachers that year were paid $35 or $40 a month.

Pay rose very slowly, if at all, between school terms. In 1927 Alex Lewis was still receiving just $40 a month. With the county school system mired in the 1930s economic depression, at one dire time pay was cut in half for almost everyone.
Lewis, over the years covered by the Mathews Journal and the Gazette-Journal, and by board minutes starting in 1922, worked at Chesapeake District School B, Glebe School, Milford Haven Colored School, Hamburg School and Thomas Hunter School, where he served at the time of his death in 1945. Sometimes at Haven School and at Thomas Hunter, his wife Blanche Carney Lewis was on the faculty working alongside him.

By the late 1930s, with a new superintendent, Dennis D. Forrest, in charge, pay began to rise for everyone, and school facilities were also improved. Thomas Hunter became an accredited high school in 1939. Appointed in July 1944 to another term teaching at Thomas Hunter, Lewis would earn $100 each month, or $900 a year.

He never earned this, his largest salary, in full, dying during the school year, still a member of the staff.

Personal life and remembrances

Alex Lewis and his family appear in a number of the U.S. Census counts taken every 10 years. The 1890 Census, nationally, was lost in a fire, and we cannot locate Lewis in 1900; perhaps he was a student taking advanced study elsewhere then.

Records indicate that he was born Oct. 9, 1877; his mother was Nellie, or Nelly, Johnson, and his father James Johnson.
By 1910, Lewis was married to Blanche, and they had three children, Robert, Bernice and Austin, ages 5, 4, and 1. Lewis was listed as a teacher. In 1920 Lewis’s mother Nellie, age 80, was living with her son, daughter-in-law and their three children. At that time both Alex and Blanche Lewis were teachers. They lived near Mathews Court House on the road heading to New Point.

A copy of Alex Lewis’s draft card from 1918 shows that he was then employed in government work at Converse Bros. in Norfolk. He was said to be of medium height and build; M. B. Garnett of the Mathews draft board signed the card.
In addition to his teaching, Lewis was active in Sunday school work. His photograph, the only one of him that we have found, appears in a large group shot taken at a countywide Bible school held in 1939 at Thomas Hunter School. Virgie Jackson of Williamsburg, who was a young student when Lewis taught at Hamburg School, identified him.

After World War II broke out, Lewis again registered for the draft in 1942, at the age of 64. He continued to teach.
Blanche Lewis died March 22, 1943, one month shy of her 64th birthday and, her obituary said, “after a brief illness of five hours and forty-five minutes.” The death certificate lists cerebral hemorrhage caused by hypertension as the cause.

“At the time of her death, Mrs. Lewis was the primary teacher in Thomas Hunter High School which place she had filled since the opening of the school in 1927,” the obit said. Survivors included her husband, two sons, her daughter, and a brother.

Alex Lewis survived her by two years. He died in Buxton Hospital, Warwick County, on April 5, 1945; the cause was listed as prostate cancer. His obituary in the Gazette-Journal said, “Mr. Lewis was a pioneer colored citizen of Mathews County, having been connected with the religious, civic and educational life of the county for nearly half a century. At the time of his death he was a faculty member of the Thomas Hunter School, treasurer of Thomas Hunter P-TA, and president of the Mathews County Teachers Association. He was also president of the Mathews County Sunday School Union and first vice-president of the Tidewater Baptist Sunday School Convention; Patron and Past Worthy Patron of the Star of Bethlehem Chapter No. 113, O.E.S., and past Worshipful Master of the Silver Leaf Lodge No. 17, AF & AM.”
His survivors were two sons, a daughter, two sisters, two brothers, three grandchildren and in-laws.

The obituary said, “The written tributes, the large number of floral designs, and the unusual crowd of sorrowing friends bore silent testimony of the esteem in which the deceased was held.”

He and his wife were members of Wayland Baptist Church and were buried by the Knight Funeral Home in Johnson’s Cemetery.

A tribute to the late Alex Lewis was paid by Kerfoot Marchant of Maplewood, New Jersey, who wrote to the Gazette-Journal that he grew up within walking distance of young Alex Lewis and his mother, who did laundry for people in the neighborhood. Their home, Marchant said, was an old slave quarter “on Capt. Alex James’s point,” which would have been on Put-In Creek, near the Marchant home.

Marchant told stories of their childhood, how young Alex, several years older than he, “taught me, among other things, how to make pop-guns out of alder branches.”

Marchant produced as fitting a legacy as anyone could hope to achieve: “I have understood in recent years that he was among and stood out as among the most worthy citizens of my old home county and respected by both white and colored and was a great influence for good among the latter. After all he was a self-made man, and that is the greatest encomium I can think of for my old play-mate.”

Lewis’s daughter followed him into the teaching profession in Mathews County. Daisy Bernice Lewis married Stanley Peterson, a son from a neighboring family, on May 11, 1947. She lived 10 more years, dying in 1957.

With thanks to Virgie Jackson, Sandra Spencer, Edith Turner and Bessida White for their assistance in compiling information for this article.