In the fall of 1861, Mary Peake began teaching Black children who had escaped slavery in Virginia. Her classroom was beneath a large oak tree near Fort Monroe, where thousands of formerly enslaved people had sought refuge behind Union lines. At a time when laws had restricted Black education across the South, Peake created a school where children emerging from slavery could learn to read and write. The tree would later become known as the Emancipation Oak, while Peake’s school became part of the history of what is now Hampton University.
Mary Smith Peake was born free as Mary Smith Kelsey in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1823. Her father was an Englishman, while her mother was a free woman of color. When Mary was six, her mother sent her to Alexandria, where she lived with her aunt and received an education for about ten years. Her schooling was unusual for a Black girl in the antebellum South, where laws and customs severely restricted educational opportunities for people of African descent.
When Peake returned to Norfolk in 1839 at just sixteen, she began secretly teaching enslaved and free African people to read and write. In Virginia, teaching enslaved people was against the law, while free Black people also faced restrictions designed to keep education out of their reach. Peake knew the risks, but she continued anyway.
In 1847, Peake moved to Hampton with her mother and stepfather, Thompson Walker. She continued teaching in secret while supporting herself as a dressmaker. She also founded the Daughters of Zion, a women’s charitable organization that helped poor and sick members of the Black community.
In 1851, Peake married Thomas Peake, a formerly enslaved man who worked in the merchant marine. They had a daughter, Hattie, whom they called Daisy. By the time the Civil War began, Peake had spent years teaching, organizing and caring for people in her community. She had built a life around service at a time when Black women had few opportunities to do so openly.
The Civil War soon changed the world around her. In May 1861, Union forces captured Fort Monroe, making it one of the few areas of Virginia under Union control. Enslaved people began fleeing Confederate territory and arriving at the fort in search of safety. When Confederate authorities demanded that the Union return them, General Benjamin Butler refused, instead classifying the fugitives as “contraband of war.”
Thousands of Black refugees eventually gathered around Fort Monroe in what became known as the Grand Contraband Camp. Many had escaped slavery with little more than what they could carry, but they now had opportunities that had previously been denied to them. Among their most urgent needs was education, particularly for children.
Peake responded by opening a school. On September 17, 1861, she began teaching children beneath a large live oak in Phoebus, near Fort Monroe. The American Missionary Association supported her work and hired her as its first Black teacher. Her school quickly grew, eventually serving more than fifty children during the day while Peake taught adults at night.
The location of the school was significant. Under the branches of the oak, children who had recently escaped slavery learned skills that slaveholders had long tried to keep from Black people. Literacy had been restricted because it could give enslaved Africans greater access to information, communication and knowledge about the world beyond the plantation. Now, behind Union lines, Peake was teaching those same skills openly.
The American Missionary Association eventually provided Peake with a small building known as Brown Cottage. The school and the educational work that developed around it became part of the foundation of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, established in 1868. The institution later became Hampton University.
Peake would never live to see how far the school she started would grow. Already suffering from tuberculosis, she continued teaching the children and adults who depended on her, refusing to let her illness pull her away from the work she had devoted her life to. On February 22, 1862, just months after opening her school, Peake died in Hampton at the age of 38. She was gone before the educational movement around Fort Monroe had taken shape, but the work she began did not die with her. Other teachers carried it forward, continuing to educate the Black community and helping build the foundation of a new era in Black education.
The oak tree where Peake had taught would acquire another place in history. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Later that year, the proclamation was read aloud to a gathering of Black residents beneath the same oak where Peake had established her school. The tree subsequently became known as the Emancipation Oak.
The Emancipation Oak still stands on the campus of Hampton University and has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Its history connects emancipation and education, two transformations that reshaped Black life during and after the Civil War.
Sources:
https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/educator-resources/changemakers/items/show/3
