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Mary Smith Peake was born from a family who were free from slavery in Norfolk, Virginia in 1823. During her early childhood she moved to the city of Hampton, Va. with her family to earn a better living.
By the age of 24, Peake was secretly teaching enslaved, as well as free, African-American children and adults to read and write, which was prohibited by law after the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831.
During the Civil War, Union General Benjamin F. Butler’s “contraband of war” decision at Fort Monroe in 1861 changed the fates of many African-American slaves, enabling hundreds to reach freedom under the sanctuary of the Union.
Shortly thereafter, Peake was hired as the first African-American teacher by the American Missionary Association to also begin teaching “contraband” slaves to read and write under the limbs of a live oak tree near Ft. Monroe, which is now the community of Phoebus, Va.
Peak continued to teach even while she was sick and bed-ridden, and later died of a serious illness in 1863.
That same year, many African-American from the Hampton Roads community gathered under the tree that had sheltered Peak and her students to hear the first Southern reading of President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, thereafter the tree was called the Emancipation Oak.
Though Peake did not live to see that historic event, the oak tree had already earned its place in history by serving as her first classroom. Five years after her death, the American Missionary Association founded Hampton University at the site of the Emancipation Oak, which was originally Peake’s outdoor classroom.
Today the Emancipation Oak, with its limbs sprawling over 100 feet in diameter, is designated as one of the 10 Great Trees of the World by the National Geographic Society.
| Date Taken: | 02.08.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 02.21.2017 09:16 |
| Story ID: | 224137 |
| Location: | HAMPTON, VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 61 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Mary Smith Peake and the Emancipation Oak, by Tetaun Moffett, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
