MRS. MARY BILLING'S SCHOOL.

Of the early teachers of Colored schools in this district there is no
one whose name is mentioned with more gratitude and respect by the
intelligent Colored residents than that of Mrs. Mary Billing, who
established the first Colored school that was gathered in Georgetown.
She was an English woman; her husband, Joseph Billing, a
cabinet-maker, coming from England in 1800, settled with his family
that year in Washington, and dying in 1807, left his wife with three
children. She was well educated, a capable and good woman, and
immediately commenced teaching to support her family. At first, it is
believed, she was connected with the Corporation School of Georgetown.
It was while in a white school certainly that her attention was
arrested by the wants of the Colored children, whom she was accustomed
to receive into her schools, till the opposition became so marked that
she decided to make her school exclusively Colored. She was a woman of
strong religious convictions, and being English, with none of the
ideas peculiar to slave society, when she saw the peculiar destitution
of the Colored children in the community around her, she resolved to
give her life to the class who seemed most to need her services. She
established a Colored school about 1810, in a brick house still
standing on Dunbarton Street, opposite the Methodist church, between
Congress and High streets, remaining there till the winter of
1820-'21, when she came to Washington and opened a school in the house
on H Street, near the Foundry Church, then owned by Daniel Jones, a
Colored man, and still owned and occupied by a member of that family.
She died in 1826, in the fiftieth year of her age. She continued her
school till failing health, a year or so before her death, compelled
its relinquishment. Her school was always large, it being patronized
in Georgetown as well as afterward by the best Colored families of
Washington, many of whom sent their children to her from Capitol Hill
and the vicinity of the Navy Yard. Most of the better-educated Colored
men and women now living, who were school children in her time,
received the best portion of their education from her, and they all
speak of her with a deep and tender sense of obligation. Henry Potter
succeeded her in the Georgetown school, and after him Mr. Shay, an
Englishman, who subsequently came to Washington and for many years had
a large Colored school in a brick building known as