Recognizing that diversity is our strength, Mary Santos Barros (1923-2018) was a strong and tireless advocate for equal education for all, Cape Verdean advancement, and many other causes in New Bedford. She demonstrated how others can build an inclusive community that treats all people with respect and dignity.

Mary’s concern for her own children and the children of others informed her active advocacy through Parent Teacher Associations (PTA)—coalitions of parents and teachers that advocate for public education and serve as a resource for community families. During the mid-20th century, many women used PTAs to organize on their children’s behalf. Mary often served as president of these PTAs. She also served on the executive committee of the Committee of Concerned Parents for New Bedford schools and was instrumental in the building and dedication of the Alfred J. Gomes Elementary School in 1977, named for a local Cape Verdean attorney and leader.

Using her experiences working in the PTA as a launching pad, Mary became more politically involved. Mary recognized that in order to accomplish certain objectives, one has to be active on many levels. Through a grassroots campaign, going door-to-door, to meet and listen to her constituents, she was elected to the New Bedford City Council in 1989 and served two terms as Ward 4 councilor. Upon her election she remarked that she would be “in the City Council for all the people of Ward 4.” Mary, like Rosalind Poll Brooker before her, brought her knowledge of the community to the Council to fight for changes from within City Hall. Her time in political office was marked by her support for affordable housing, drug rehabilitation programs, anti-poverty efforts, and continued educational advocacy through legislation.

She also brought her advocacy to the state level as a social worker for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services and as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1975-1979. She was recognized “for her distinguished service through the establishment of increased opportunities for the youth and exemplary parent participation.” She was also elected as a city and then a state Committeewoman to the Democratic Party Conventions.

Mary was a strong advocate for all people, particularly people of color, and especially Cape Verdeans. Her own Cape Verdean heritage was important to her and she did much to help Cape Verdeans in New Bedford and the land of her parents. When natural disasters assaulted Cape Verde, Mary, using her organizing skills, worked with others to lobby on state and federal levels to raise funds and send needed supplies to the islands. A believer in political empowerment as well, Mary helped many Cape Verdean immigrants become American citizens and served as a voice for immigrant parents, often taking them to school committee meetings and interpreting for them.

Her legacy is a powerful example that served as a role-model for her own children and all community members, as she spread the knowledge that they can empower themselves and strengthen the community.

Thank you to the family of Mary Santos Barros for their contributions to Mary’s biography and providing photographs. Their stories showcased Mary’s special qualities and tireless efforts on behalf of her family and community.

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Jennie Horne’s (1920-1998) influential career in social services was fueled by her idealism, her love of people, and a desire to contribute to her community in New Bedford. During a time in which information on how people of color could access social programs was not always available, Jennie worked to make sure it was. She advised families on new initiatives that offered educational and job opportunities for everyone, particularly encouraging women of color to join the workforce. Wherever she went people shared their goals and dreams, and Jennie always responded positively with a smile and an offer of help. She is remembered as an “encourager, a connector, and a helper” who always lent a hand to raise others up.

Jennie started as a secretary in the main office of New Bedford’s ONBOARD (Organized New Bedford Opportunity And Resource Development), an anti-poverty community action project agency. Through ONBOARD, she helped acquire grants for city programs that provided education, employment, and recreation opportunities for minorities and poor people. Jennie then went to the West Central Community Center, eventually serving as its director. There she initiated several programs to aid the disadvantaged.

One of Jennie’s greatest gifts was her knowledge of the people who lived in the West End. She kept mental notes on the talents and needs of the people in her neighborhood. Robert Horne remembers his mother as seeming “to know instinctively who to call on in the West End to ask for assistance and also who in the West End might need the assistance that the [West Central Community Center] could provide.” She knew who had the sewing skills to lead a sewing class or the bookkeeping skills to organize and operate a neighborhood credit union.

Jennie also worked for Model Cities, a federal urban assistance program that—along with ONBOARD—was part of the War on Poverty, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s legislative agenda that sought to attack the root causes of poverty and provide opportunity for all. In 1968, New Bedford was one of 151 cities chosen in the Model Cities project, whose mission was to address the effects of prejudice and neglect on urban communities. While at Model Cities, Jennie was involved in improving public school reorganization, public housing development, and relations between police and the community. Model Cities eventually became the Community Development Block Grant Program. Later, as a member of the Mayor’s Citizen Advisory Committee, Jennie helped to channel federal Community Block Grants during several different mayoral administrations.

With boundless energy, Jennie served on several PTAs, nonprofit boards, and women’s organizations, including as president of the Martha Briggs Educational Club. Founded in 1920 by women of color, today the Martha Briggs Educational Club provides scholarships to local minority high school students. In 1939, the Club purchased the Sgt. William H. Carney House at 128 Mill Street where it has been headquartered ever since. For a century, the Club has been led by women of color like Jennie Horne and exists as a forum to self-organize from and advocate for their community. Its members have always been dedicated to education and the role that community service plays in making lives and community richer.

Jennie is remembered as personifying the motto of the Martha Briggs Educational Club: “Lifting as we climb.” Throughout her life, Jennie Horne was a tireless advocate for the disadvantaged. Through her government positions, involvement with community organizations, and everyday encouragement, Jennie worked to bring aid and assistance to those who needed it most. In 2020, residents and friends of New Bedford honored Jennie by selecting her as one of two women represented by large murals at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Jennie exemplified how one woman can light the way for others, who in turn can light the way for those who follow.

Thank you to the family of Jennie Horne for their contributions to Jennie’s biography and providing photographs. Their stories showcased Jennie’s special qualities and tireless efforts on behalf of her family and community.

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Born in 1738, Moses Brown was the youngest of the five brothers born into the prominent Brown family. He became an abolitionist, and manumitted his slaves in 1773; he did this although other members of the Brown family were slave traders. He was also a merchant, working for his uncle Obadiah at Obadiah Brown & Co., later Nicholas Brown & Co. and run by Moses and his brothers Nicholas, John, and Joseph. Moses was also a reformer, serving as a deputy in the Rhode Island General Assembly from 1764 to 1771, and actively opposing the Stamp Act in 1765.

He joined the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in 1774 after the death of his first wife, Anna. Six years later, in 1780, Moses donated $575 to the Friends of New England for the establishment of a school (for both Quaker and non-Quaker children) in Rhode Island. He had a keen interest in the school from the start.

In 1784, the Friends’ Yearly Meeting School opened in Portsmouth, only to close after another four years due to low enrollment and budget concerns. More than thirty years would pass before the school’s reemergence. Still believing in the importance of an education built upon the ethical values of the Friends Society, in 1814 Brown donated forty-three acres of land in Providence for the reestablishment of the school. From 1819 to 1902 the school was known as the Friends’ Meeting School, before being renamed the Moses Brown School, in honor of its most important benefactor, in the 1920s.

Designed by renowned Providence architect John Holden Greene, the new school opened its doors on January 1, 1819. Initially, non-Quaker children paid higher tuition and had to agree to conform to specific standards before they could be admitted to the school. With an average yearly attendance of 125 over the first decade, the new iteration of the Friends’ School was considered an instant success. In 1822 Moses Brown’s only son, Obadiah passed away, and in his will he gifted a total of $100,000 for the building and furnishings, and an additional $650 worth of books and maps. The donation allowed the school to expand as its popularity increased.

During the first century of operation, boys and girls were accepted to the school. At the turn of the twentieth century, co-ed schools were becoming increasingly controversial, and in 1925 the Moses Brown School became a boys-only institution, sending female students to the nearby Lincoln School. Only in the 1970s did the school again admit female students. Today the school continues as an elite private Friends’ school on Providence’s east side.

In 2015 the Moses Brown School gained internet fame when Head of School Matt Glendinning parodied the hit Disney song, “Let it Go” on YouTube. His snow day announcement, “School is Closed” raked in over 4.1 million views and was featured on NBC’s Today Show.

Notable alumni of the school include Jesse Williams, political activist and actor on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, and Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, Jr., the 32nd and 34th Mayor of Providence.

Moses Brown died on September 6, 1836. He rests in the North Burial Ground’s Quaker cemetery, a parcel of land that Moses Brown formerly owned.

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The Bell School was built in 1841 as a school for District No. 14, on the west side of the river. There was evidently some jealousy aroused in the other school districts when the residents of the Head of Westport decided to build so magnificent a building to be used as a mere schoolhouse. The Bell School was one of nineteen one-room schools that once dotted the Westport landscape in the nineteenth century. However, these once-admired buildings became the focus of a decades-long debate about education and an unsustainable district system. By 1900, the Westport School Committee described the overall conditions of Westport schools as “Deplorable! Unhealthful! Worn out! Dismal! Repulsive!” Nothing illustrates the plight of children in the 1800s more dramatically than the daily hardships that they faced at school. Although each one-room school differed somewhat from the exterior, they were all equally primitive inside and presented the students with some serious challenges to their wellbeing. In the winter, children risked being sprayed with hot soot from malfunctioning woodstoves. They risked contracting life-threatening diseases through the prevalent use of the common drinking cup and appallingly unkempt outhouses. They faced serious bullying and class disruption as anywhere from fifteen to fifty pupils ranging in age from five to twenty years crowded into a single room. Many children were sentenced to a life of impaired eyesight from the lack of adequate lighting in the schools. It is astounding that within these difficult conditions, children managed to read the literary classics, learn complex bookkeeping skills, take in the practical arts (music, drawing, agriculture), and learn how to plant gardens. Despite the poor conditions inside the buildings, the one-room schoolhouse has left a lasting architectural legacy, such as the Greek Revival Bell School and the temple-like Wolf Pit School. Many of the buildings that were once one-room schools still survive, but have been significantly altered. The struggle to provide an effective public education system is ongoing and many of the concerns voiced in the nineteenth century are still relevant today. In 1972, the Westport Library Association gave the Bell School to the Westport Historical Society, and so the building continues to dispense knowledge—even if in a different manner.

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Frances Henley’s involvement in the construction of Wheeler School in Providence can be interpreted as a means of positioning herself in the collective memory of the city by linking her name with the values of education. Both Henley and Mary Colman Wheeler, the founder of the eponymous school, had artistic backgrounds, which made the association of the two women natural and interesting.

The idea to found a school for women exclusively came from Miss Wheeler’s practice of instructing girls in the art of painting. However, she turned to a more classical format of a holistic system of teaching. Wheeler founded her private school in 1889, after a rich experience in France and Germany. She was trained as an artist and studied in Paris for six years, before she returned to Providence in 1882. Henley, who graduated cum laude from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1897 was also interested in sharing the principles of architecture and interior design with young women. She disseminated her ideas about residential architecture not as a teacher, but as a professional, who was invited to give public speeches to the Clubs and association that she was also a member of.

To accommodate the increasing number of students, Miss Wheeler decided to build a new structure, commissioning Franklin J. Sawtelle (1846-1911), a renowned architect in Providence, in 1910 to make the project for a new building on Hope Street. Sawtelle died unexpectedly just one year later, while in the middle of the design of the school. As a result, Henley took over the entire project. She added an elevator to the main building of the school in 1913, and she signed the project alone.

Later she was asked to design a playground dedicated to hockey and athletic activities that would become part of Wheeler School, in Rumford, a project originally known as “Wheeler School Farm.” The project, even though apparently minor, shows her ability to appropriate the natural terrain in a successful landscape design, as the lot is still being used today for athletic scopes. Moreover, it shows Henley’s personal and professional knowledge of the sportive technical equipment, as she was herself teaching women how to play basketball. She remained the consulting architect for the school for about 25 years.

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An increasing Irish-Catholic immigrant population occupying Providence in the 1840s necessitated the need of both a parish and school. Saint Patrick’s Church was established in 1841 and, within two years, the school followed. Opened on November 1, 1843, as a Sunday School, the original building was constructed behind the church and fully furnished at a cost of five hundred dollars. Soon after construction, the structure went through several changes. In 1845, the building was moved from Smith Street to Davis Street and enlarged to two rooms “capable of containing 300 children each, with yards and outhouses, separate for boys and girls.” In 1848, St. Patrick’s became a day school for 35 boys with tuition at $1 per quarter, followed a few years later by a school for girls run by Sisters of Mercy. By 1871, the original building was replaced with a new structure to meet the demands of the continually growing community. Built on Davis Street in Providence, this new building, larger than the original to meet expected attendance demands, was a brick structure with eight classrooms and a large hall for school assemblies and parish activities. It served as a Grammar School until 1923 when it became Saint Patrick’s High School. While the school maintained its presence on Davis Street, another change was coming to Saint Patrick’s. Reverend Martin F. Reddy decided that the school needed to once more go back to Smith Street and continue to serve the needs and education of the children. Believing that a modern building, larger and more suitable to the needs of the community and children, was needed, Reverend Reddy moved forward with his plans. After purchasing Jones Lot on Smith Street, the new structure served as an elementary school upon completion in 1928 and continued to educate the children of Smith Hill until the first major significant change in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1960s, Smith Hill underwent a rapid transformation. Urban redevelopment, the completion of Route 95, and declining populations in the area resulted in diminishing parishioners to Saint Patrick’s Church. Along with these changes, high operating costs, and lack of enrollment the building closed its doors in 1971. Then, one year later, the school found itself in full operation once again. In collaboration with the Word of God Community, it reopened as Saint Patrick’s Word of God School. As part of the Charismatic Renewal Movement, the Word of God Community held weekly prayer meetings within the community. Students attended day classes, while parents enrolled in an eight-week “Life in the Spirit” seminar to understand the Christian way of life. With these methods in place, Saint Patrick’s reopened, continuing to teach school children over the next thirty years. In 2003, Saint Patrick’s School experienced another potential closing because of financial problems and declining enrollment. Despite passionate pleas and generous donations, the elementary school closed in 2008 in favor of a Catholic high school. On August 24, 2009, Saint Patrick’s School was changed to Saint Patrick’s Academy, focusing on a high school curriculum with a religious based faith. Today, the school thrives as it prepares students for college. St. Patrick’s Academy is selective, only accepting 25 freshman every year. Once students are accepted and enrolled, they are provided support as they pursue college. Through the Explore Club, St. Patrick’s students work with Providence College to determine their long-term goals, while parents receive assistance with FAFSA forms. Its graduating class averages fifteen students, all college bound towards promising futures.

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Few places in downtown evoke such fond memories like the iconic Shepard Company Department Store, a fixture of the 19th and 20th-century Providence shopping experience. Built in the 1870s, Shepard’s initially was 6,400 square feet. By 1903, it grew to include 301,000 square feet, occupying an entire city block!

In it's prime, Shepard's also helped to orient visitors in downtown Providence. Meeting “at the clock” friends and families used the large 19th-century cast iron clock outside the Westminster Street entrance as a point of reference. Though once successful, the Shepard Company went bankrupt in 1974. Fortunately, the exterior of the building and its iconic clock still remain largely unchanged.

Today the Shepard’s Building serves various educational institutions, an example of repurposing an iconic space to serve the neighborhood’s needs.

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Johnson & Wales University is a world renowned leader in experiential education, with degree programs in arts and sciences, business, culinary arts, education, hospitality, engineering and design, and more. Fittingly, the Providence campus is located in the heart of the 19th and 20th century retail hub of downtown. Though Johnson & Wales has over 16,000 students and several campuses around the country today, the school had very humble beginnings in Providence.

If the walls of University Hall could talk, they might tell you about the time they met George Washington (although don’t believe them if they tell you he slept here). The first building constructed on Brown’s campus, University Hall, has played host to wounded soldiers during the Revolutionary War as well as our nation’s first president, during his visit to Rhode Island in 1790. The Providence Gazette reported that despite Washington’s habit of not going out in the evening, he made his way from his lodging at the Golden Ball Inn to University Hall to accept the invitation of Brown University undergraduates. In a patriotic display, students outfitted each of the Hall’s windows with candles aglow.

Renowned for “The Brown Curriculum,” an innovative approach to undergraduate education instituted in 1970, Brown University’s philosophy states that students, who are free to design their own curriculum, are “the architects of their own course of study.” Founded in 1764 by Baptists as the College of Rhode Island, the school moved to Providence in 1770. The institution changed its name to “Brown University” in 1804 after a generous donation by Nicholas Brown, prominent Providence businessman and alumnus of the school.

With over 250 years of history under its belt, Brown University understandably boasts many styles of architecture. One of the most noticeable structures on campus is the Carrie Tower (1904). Paul Bajnotti commissioned the tower to honor the memory of his wife, Caroline Mathilde Brown, grandaughter of Nicholas Brown, Brown University’s namesake.

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Rhode Island had one of the earliest public education systems in the country, housed in this building beginning in 1800. The structure today is home to the Providence Preservation Society, formed in 1956. PPS leased the old schoolhouse from the city for its headquarters in 1960 and undertook its restoration.

The Providence Preservation Society grew out of the urgent need to rescue eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings in the College Hill area of Providence’s East Side from demolition. The College Hill Study of 1959, sponsored by PPS, the City of Providence, and the Housing and Home Finance Agency, was an early example of urban revitalization using preservation and rehabilitation rather than demolition and redevelopment. PPS has saved the historic character of whole neighborhoods and has grown into a citywide advocate for preservation.

Since 1958, PPS has offered the Festival of Historic Houses, which gives the public a behind-the-scenes look at the interiors of some of the city’s most architecturally and culturally interesting residences and buildings. PPS also publishes the annual Most Endangered Properties List to raise public awareness of the threat to the city’s architectural heritage. One success story is that of the Fox Point Bath House on Wickenden Street. The Bath House was constructed in 1926 in a move to provide bathing facilities to areas of the city without indoor plumbing. The bathhouse was used as a library in the 1950s and 60s, but fell into disuse in the 1970s. Facing vandalism, infestation, and other signs of decay, the building made PPS’s Most Endangered Buildings List in 1998, 1999, 2002, and 2003. Thanks to efforts by community preservationists and city officials, the Bath House was restored and is now used as an elementary school library.

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When schoolteacher Josephine Field Wilbor returned to her hometown of Little Compton in 1910, she found one room schoolhouses with outhouse lavatories, classrooms without heat or electricity, and students of all ages crammed into the same space. Educated at one of the nation’s first “normal” schools for teachers (now Rhode Island College), Wilbor made it her life mission to improve public education in Little Compton.

The problems Wilbor encountered ran deeper than upgrade of the town’s school buildings. Previous reformers like Sarah Brownell met resistance from residents reluctant to spend money on improving the schools or change the existing system, even for health reasons. When Brownell closed the Union School on the Common in 1891 because of uninhabitable conditions, parents demanded that it be reopened.

Long-time resident Carlton Brownell recalled the conditions of the district #2 schoolhouse in 1925: “I don’t remember when they first decided we shouldn’t drink out of the dipper in the bucket anymore. They provided paper cups and they were like little envelopes, they were ridiculous. So everyone would hold ‘em and put their whole hand right in the water. So there’s your great effort at sanitation. … It was primitive.”

Increasing numbers of students also placed strain on the system. After dropping below one-thousand residents in the 1880s, Little Compton’s population, fed by Azorean and Portuguese immigrants, boomed by the time Wilbor returned to town. The cramped, run-down, and unsanitary schools were ill-equipped to provide a modern education to the town’s growing number of children.

After assuming her position as director of Union School, Wilbor campaigned to organize the schools by grade level, citing the difficulties of teaching a multitude of education levels in the same place. In response to teachers’ claims that it was difficult to teach and learn in non-graded, one-room schoolhouses, many residents echoed the sentiment, So what? Countless Little Compton children had gone through the same system and had made out just fine.

Future Little Compton school superintendent, Benjamin S. Tubman, summed up this sentiment in a 1928 article in the Providence Journal: “One never heard them extolling the superiority of their grandfather’s venerable oxcart over the family automobile as a means of traveling.”

Wilbor won a minor victory with partial grading of the schools, and from 1918 to 1921, Little Compton had its own high school on the second floor of town hall. In 1921, Wilbor ran for town treasurer and tax collector and became the first woman in Rhode Island to hold an elective position other than school committee member. Through these positions, she advocated for increased school spending.

But Wilbor had even bigger fish to fry: a modern central school building for all grade levels. She rallied the support of the school committee and the Rhode Island Commissioner of Education. A heated battle ensued between education reformers and residents who claimed a new school would break the town.

In the midst of this battle, at the age of 48, Josephine Wilbor succumbed to pneumonia, her strength broken under the pressure of her work, according to her obituary. The fight for education reform did not end with Wilbor’s death. Buoyed by increasing support from Little Compton residents, construction began in 1928 on the Common, and doors opened to students in fall of 1929.

In a salute to Wilbor’s tireless dedication, officials named the new facility Josephine F. Wilbur School. Although Wilbor’s name was apparently misspelled, her school continues to serve the educational needs of Little Compton’s children.

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Adamsville had its very own library in the early 1920s. It was housed in the north room of Hattie and Eugene Shurtleff's house at the corner of Colebrook and Stone Church Roads. The Shurtleff's daughter Venetta (Nettie) ran the library. According to Nettie's niece, Helen Shurtleff Collins, the books in the library were Nettie's own volumes and there was no charge to borrow them. When Nettie married and moved out of town, the library closed. Mrs. Collins believes that the books were sent to the town library in the Town Clerk's office on the Little Compton Commons. Mrs. Collins remembers that her father Malcolm, the Principal of Josephine F. Wilbur School, catalogued all the books in the town library in his spare time.

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BAM! While Chef Emeril Lagasse’s catchphrase may not have started at Johnson & Wales University’s College of Culinary Arts, Lagasse did graduate in 1978 from J&W and go on to become a professional chef and television host. The Portuguese and French-Canadian restauranteur was born in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts, but launched his career in New Orleans, where he mastered his signature Creole and Cajun cuisine. The culinary arts program had only recently started when Emeril attended. While the university was founded in 1914 as a business school, what is now known as the College of Culinary Arts opened in 1973 and became more formally established in 1992. The Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University is a teaching museum that preserves and interprets culinary and hospitality heritage. Connected to the university, the museum features work and materials by and for students attending the College of Culinary Arts while also operating exhibits for regular museum visitors. In 1979, Johnson & Wales accepted industrialist Paul Fritzsche’s donation of 7,500 rare historical cookbooks, followed a decade later by a donation from educator and restaurateur Louis Szathmary of 64,000 items, including books, artifacts, menus, silver, matchbooks, pots, pans, appliances, artwork, correspondence, autographs, antiques, and advertisements spanning five hundred years. These two collections led the university to create the Culinary Archives & Museum in 1989 to highlight culinary history and culture. More recently, Zack Hanle of Bon Appetit magazine donated over 4,000 menus from around the world, and the museum has also accepted donations from Earle MacAusland of Gourmet Magazine, New York Times columnist and cookbook author Jean Hewitt, McCalls editor Mary Norton, and author and chef Julia Child, who received an honorary doctorate degree from the university in 1995. The renamed Culinary Arts Museum tells stories about food trends, traditions, and innovations, including the significant impact of the College of Culinary Arts on the Rhode Island food scene. The College of Culinary Arts has served as a catalyst for the culinary arts in the state, especially in Providence. Johnson & Wales alumni have established numerous restaurants in Rhode Island and significantly shape local food culture and the culinary arts. As Emeril would say, “Feel the love.”

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Today, needlepoint samplers that were done by students – many of them age 10 and under – at Mary Balch’s School can fetch over $100,000 at Sotheby’s auctions; they fill Pinterest pages and have had starring roles on PBS’ Antiques Roadshow. At its heyday, the school – founded by Mary’s mother, Sarah, in the 1780s after the family left Newport when the city was under siege during the Revolution – had over 100 students, many of them boarders, and was one of New England’s best known and respected needlework schools through to its closing in the 1840s. One of the factors that distinguish the work done at Balch’s school, in addition to its technical sophistication, is its subject matter: Balch’s students were unique during this period in their depiction of architecture, including buildings designed by John Holden Greene.

What purpose did these needlepoint artworks serve? At the time, young girls would receive the most basic tutoring in reading and arithmetic before being placed (if they were from families with means) in schools that taught “female accomplishments”: music, watercolor painting, comportment and sewing. Sewing was an important skill as married women were expected to sew clothes and linens for her family. Needlepoint work laid the foundation for this work, but it also showed off the accomplishments of a young girl to prospective suitors – the best work was often framed and hung in the parlor.

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