which Middleton first
taught, on I, near Twenty-second Street. Mr. Fletcher was an
Englishman, a well-educated gentleman, and a thorough teacher. He was
induced to open the school by the importunities of some aspiring
Colored young men in that part of the city, who desired first-rate
instruction. He soon became the object of persecution, though he was a
man of courtesy and excellent character. His school-house was finally
set on fire and consumed, with all its books and furniture; but the
school took, as its asylum, the basement of the John Wesley Church.
The churches which they had been forced to build in the days of the
mobs, when they were driven from the white churches which they had
aided in building, proved of immense service to them in their
subsequent struggles. Mrs. Fletcher kept a variety store, which was
destroyed about the time the school was opened. She then became an
assistant in her husband's school, which numbered over one hundred and
fifty pupils. In 1858, they were driven from the city, as persecution
at that time was particularly violent against all white persons who
instructed the Colored people. This school was conducted with great
thoroughness, and had two departments, Mrs. Fletcher, who was an
accomplished person, having charge of the girls in a separate room.

ELIZA ANNE COOK,

a niece of Rev. John F. Cook, and one of his pupils, who has been
teaching for about fifteen years, should be mentioned. She attended
Miss Miner's school for a time, and was afterward at the Baltimore
convent two years. She opened a school in her mother's house, and
subsequently built a small school-house on the same lot, Sixteenth
Street, between K and L streets. With the exception of three years,
during which she was teaching in the free Catholic school opened in
the Smothers school-house in 1859, and one year in the female school
in charge of the Colored sisters, she has maintained her own private
school from 1854 down to the present time, her number at some periods
being above sixty, but usually not more than twenty-five or thirty.

MISS WASHINGTON'S SCHOOL.

In 1857, Annie E. Washington opened a select primary school in her
mother's house, on K Street, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth
streets, west. The mother, a widow woman, was a laundress, and by her
own labor has given her children good advantages, though she had no
such advantages herself. This daughter was educated chiefly under Rev.
John E. Cook and