I attended Waters Normal Institute to become a teacher.

Every summer I would go away to summer school to improve my teaching and work at beaches between school and summer school.
When they made the law for teachers to stop at age sixty-five, I cried. I loved to teach, and I loved every child I ever taught. They were all my children.

I decided to try to write something about the school relating the many things I remembered about my experiences there. This way the alumni, their children, and their children’s children could relive memories of what went on at this beloved school.

I attended Waters Normal Institute to become a teacher.

Amaza Drummond Brown,
who married Dr. Brown
shortly after the founding of
Chowan Academy.
Photography courtesy of the Pope House Museum, Raleigh.

He secured work keeping the city cemetery and any other work he could find until he finished Friend’s School. The money he earned was given to his mother to help support his family. Even though he worked, he graduated with honors. Then he taught school at home for two years after receiving his first grade teaching certificate in 1878. His mother encouraged him to go on to college, and so with five dollars in his pocket and at twenty-three years of age he entered Shaw University. He knew he would have to work hard in order to stay there, so he applied for work.

His first job there was as secretary to Dr. Henry Martin Tupper who was the president at that time. Dr. Tupper recognized his great potential and foresaw a bright future for Calvin Scott Brown if he could only stay in school. Dr. Tupper interested some of his white friends to help Calvin, and they began giving him scholarships. He also received financial help from a northern white church. He became an honor student and graduated with highest honors from Shaw University in 1886 with Bachelor of arts, Masters of Arts and Doctor of Divinity degrees.

Levi Brown owned almost all the land on this end of town, and he agreed to give them a few acres for a high school for Negroes. Our fore-parents began to clear away trees for Chowan Academy's first building. The church at Pleasant Plains on Highway 13 needed a pastor, and Dr. Brown, through a mutual friend at college, had met a [Manassas T.] Pope from Hertford County who asked him to come to Pleasant Plains to preach. Dr. Brown came to Winton by boat from Edenton, North Carolina. Dr. Pope, his former classmate, met him at the wharf and took him by horse and buggy to the Plains community. Dr. Brown liked the community and became the first principal of the high school in 1886.

About that time the people in Winton North Carolina, had only a small one-teacher private school in the woods about where Horace Brown’s auto shop is now [the school of Pleasant Plains Church also existed a couple of miles from Winton]. It was called Reynolds Grove, and William Keene was the teacher. Young blacks could go only through elementary school there. People in our community had several call meetings and decided to have a school so that their children could go higher in school.

The first school year of Chowan Academy was only four months in length. There was only one building with four teachers, but it was a good school from the very beginning. During the second year, a second building was built.

After Mr. Waters gave us $8,000.00, the school name was changed to Waters Normal Institute, and the building called Reynolds Hall was built and named for another northern friend. Reynolds Hall burned to the ground late one night in 1941 . The cause was always thought to be faulty electric wiring. We had no fire engines or rescue workers to help us, so someone passing, Mr. Dixon, and a pal stopped and rang the outdoor bell and honked their car horns.

Many of the teachers stood there that night and cried, especially [Dr. Brown's] daughter Flora who knew how much her parents had worked and sacrificed for that building. Much of the furniture was saved, but many books and records were burned.

I was a witness to that fire, and I cried also. We had tried so hard.

We had one building burned before that. It was always thought that it started from fellows who were pressing their trousers with hot flat irons heated on pot bellied stoves and left them on the ironing board unattended.

Dr. Brown was an excellent leader at school and in the community. He was intelligent, and people went to him for answers. He advised people on politics and religion. He had a good personality: he was a good mixer and a good listener. He was a friend to people.

He played an organ and blew a coronet He knew vocal and instrumental music and organized a local band. He served three years on the Board of Education of Hertford County after the county took over the school. He was chairman of the campaign for selling Liberty Bonds in Hertford County during the First World War. He organized the C. S. Brown Masonic chapter and held a state position in that fraternity during his lifetime. The Masonic organization in Winton is named for him, and they hold their meetings in the renovated original first Chowan Academy Building. Through his religious work, he was sent abroad several times as a missionary.

Dr. Brown always had help in the house so that his wife could be free to help him more. There were always young women and men that were not able to pay their way in school, and so they were happy to live with the Browns and bring in the wood, make the fires, and do the little chores needing to be done in any home. He hired a cook and nursemaid for his children. His children were sent away to some of the best schools in the country.The last daughter, Mrs. Marie Frazier, wife of noted late Negro sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, spent her last five years in the old home. Dr. Frazier wrote a book, The Negro Family, in which many of the [studies] were picked from families in Hertford County.

Naturally life was not always a bed of roses for the Browns. The baby girl, Christine, had a little next door neighbor, who was near her own age. They were playing with matches one day when Christine’s clothes caught fire and she was fatally burned. She was about four or five years old at the time. She lived about twenty-four hours. It was said that she begged for her mother as long as she was conscious, but her mother had gone into shock and could not hear or see her baby ever again.

~ Next edition in July: Recreation, buildings and more ~

I had a brother, a dentist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, so I began going to Philadelphia each summer and taking courses in administration and supervision at the University of Pennsylvania until I graduated with a Master of Arts degree from that great school.

I am a member of Pleasant Plains Baptist Church and have held the distinction of being a member of the trustee board. I was chairman of the Pastor's Aide Club for several years and also chairman of the Hospitality Club.”

Mrs. Nickens has been Vice President of the Democratic Women's Club of Hertford County, and a volunteer of the Auxiliary of Roanoke Chowan Hospital. She has attended a couple of classes under supervision of the Technical School of Herttord County. At one time she was attending five classes at one time.

Since retiring from teaching at C. S. Brown for forty-seven consecutive years and then substituting for ten more, Mrs. Nickens kept busy doing volunteer work in the community.

Mrs. Alice Nickens was a charter member of the C. S. Brown Cultural Arts Center. Along with her sister, Sally, Mrs. Nickens were instrumental in getting $200,000 from the state fund to help restore the building. Miss Alice has been a treasurer of that Association.

“I loved to teach, especially little children, and I really enjoyed every minute spent in the classrooms with ‘my children’."

"This book is dedicated in loving memory of my dear mother, Annie Walden Jones, the first graduate of C. S. Brown High School. It is also in memory of the many dedicated teachers who willingly gave their time and energy in service to the school, the students, and community."

-Alice Jones Nickens, October 1, 1986