“We may be small, but we are mighty,” Thomas Hunter Middle School assistant principal Amy Hauser said as she glanced out at the smaller-than-anticipated crowd for Monday’s fifth annual Founder’s Day program in the school’s J. Murray Brooks Auditorium.

About 70-80 people were in attendance in the program that celebrated Thomas Hunter’s origins as a segregated school for the county’s black youth, as well as the school’s namesake, a man born into slavery who died at the ripe old age of 104 in 1910 and whose reputation as a skilled worker and well-liked member of the community provided a role model for others to follow.

Monday’s program was competing with a Mathews-Gloucester girls’ basketball game, many were home with the flu and other factors led to the decreased crowd size, Hauser said.

Although the turnout that evening was not as large as was hoped, Hauser assured those in attendance that during a student assembly earlier...