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"St Albans High School was
one of my favorite places to teach," remarked Miss Mary Fravel,
retired high school teacher.
Miss Fravel,
who began teaching Latin and English at St. Albans High School in
1915, taught at SAHS for four years. The school then located at
the present site of Central Grade School, was comparatively smaller
than the present high school. "There were only eight or ten
teachers," stated Miss Fravel. "I remember one year when
there was only twelve graduates--four girls and eight boys."
I liked it up there," she continued, "we had many parties."
"The
boys and girls both played basketball," the ex-teacher went
on to say. "I was chaperone most of the time when we played
other schools in Kentucky and all around," she added as she
reminisced for a moment.
Miss Fravel began her teaching
after graduating from West Virginia University in 1910. Since that
time she has taught in many different places. She was once offered
a job in Hawaii, which she refused. " It was too far to go,"
she said.
She taught at the Girls' Industrial school
in Salem, West Virginia for one year, "I had to whip the girls
with a big paddle," she stated. She went on to say, "I
didn't like to do that, but I had to--why, one girl even threatened
to kill me; so I put her in the back of the room."
"I
usually had around 50 girls in a class, but they came and went.
I never knew why they left nor where they went, and I never asked,"
was Miss Fravel's observation.
Miss Fravel spends
most of her time either in traveling or in pursuing one of her many
hobbies. She lives at Bills Creek on 540 acres of a farm that once
consisted of 2000 acres. "The farm has been in the family for
146 years," she stated.
Miss Fravel's travels
have taken her throughout the new England states several times.
She said that she would like to travel as much as she possibly could.
"Travel gives my mind something to think about all the time,"
was her comment.
Mis Fravel comes from a family
of teachers. Both her father and mother taught, a fact which, she
feels, influenced her decision to teach. She has a niece who teaches
at Poca now.
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