he matter of a
high school, being frustrated by the circumstances that there were so
few good schools in the city for the Colored people, at that period,
that his old patrons would not allow him to shut off the multitude of
primary scholars which were depending upon his school. His seminary,
however, continued to maintain its high standard, and had an average
attendance of quite 100 year after year, till he surrendered up his
work in death.

He raised up a large family and educated them well. The oldest of the
sons, John and George, were educated at Oberlin College. The other
three, being young, were in school when the father died. John and
George, it will be seen, succeeded their father as teachers,
continuing in the business down to the present year. Of the two
daughters, the elder was a teacher till married in 1866, and the other
is now a teacher in the public schools of the city. One son served
through the war as sergeant in the Fortieth Colored Regiment, and
another served in the navy.

At the death of the father, March 21, 1855, the school fell into the
hands of the son, John F. Cook, who continued it till May, 1857, when
it passed to a younger son, George F. T. Cook, who moved it from its
old home, the Smothers House, to the basement of the Presbyterian
Church, in the spring of 1858, and maintained it till July, 1859. John
F. Cook, jr., who had erected a new school-house on Sixteenth Street,
in 1862, again gathered the school which the tempests of the war had
dispersed, and continued it till June, 1867, when the new order of
things had opened ample school facilities throughout the city, and the
teacher was called to other duties. Thus ended the school which had
been first gathered by Smothers nearly forty-five years before, and
which, in that long period, had been continually maintained with
seldom less than one hundred pupils, and for the most part with one
hundred and fifty, the only suspensions being in the year of the Snow
riot, and in the two years which ushered in the war.

The Smothers House, after the Cook school was removed in 1858, was
occupied for two years by a _free Catholic school_, supported by "The
St. Vincent de Paul Society," a benevolent organization of Colored
people. It was a very large school with two departments, the boys
under David Brown, and the girls under Eliza Anne Cook, and averaging
over one hundred and fifty scholars. When this school was transferred
to another house, Rev. Chau