, which, in that room and in the house adjoining, he maintained
with great success for the ensuing twelve years. Mr. McCoy was a pupil
of Mrs. Billing and Henry Smothers; is a man of good sense, and his
school gave a respectable rudimental education to multitudes, who
remember him as a teacher with great respect. He is now a messenger in
the Treasury Department. In 1833, a school was established by Fanny
Hampton, in the western part of the city, on the northwest corner of K
and Nineteenth streets. It was a large school, and was continued till
about 1842, the teacher dying soon afterward. She was half-sister of
Lindsay Muse. Margaret Thompson succeeded her, and had a flourishing
school of some forty scholars on Twenty-sixth Street, near the avenue,
for several years, about 1846. She subsequently became the wife of
Charles H. Middleton, and assisted in his school for a brief time.
About 1830, Robert Brown commenced a small school, and continued it at
intervals for many years till his death. As early as 1833, there was a
school opened in a private house in the rear of Franklin Row, near the
location of the new Franklin School building. It was taught by a white
man, Mr. Talbot, and continued a year or two. Mrs. George Ford, a
white teacher, a native of Virginia, kept a Colored school in a brick
house still standing on New Jersey Avenue, between K and L streets.
She taught there many years, and as early, perhaps, as half a century
ago.

DR. JOHN H. FLEET'S SCHOOL

was opened, in 1836, on New York Avenue, in a school-house which stood
nearly on the spot now occupied by the Richards buildings at the
corner of New York Avenue and Fourteenth Street. It had been
previously used for a white school, taught by Mrs. McDaniel, and was
subsequently again so used. Dr. Fleet was a native of Georgetown, and
was greatly assisted in his education by the late Judge James Morsell,
of that city, who was not only kind to this family, but was always
regarded by the Colored people of the district as their firm friend
and protector. John H. Fleet, with his brothers and sisters, went to
the Georgetown Lancasterian School, with the white children, for a
long period, in their earlier school days, and subsequently to other
white schools. He was also for a time a pupil of Smothers and Prout.
He was possessed of a brilliant and strong intellect, inherited from
his father, who was a white man of distinguished abilities. He studied
medicine in Washing