D.B. Roark

From Front Dustcover Cover:

Son of a Confederate veteran, Daniel Blythe Roark was born during the depth of the punitive Reconstruction era in the contentious area of East Tennessee, heavily populated by Union veterans and supportive families. His early years were spent within the limited scope of his initial world, primarily circumscribed by the Tenth Civil District of James County,  the most rural of counties in Tennessee. In this story of his life, the reader is introduced to the subject’s limited early education in a one-teacher school and follows him as his world enlarges, his education increases, and he becomes a consummate teacher in the public schools of Tennessee and Texas. In light of the fact that his birth occurred only 30 years after Horace Mann of Massachusetts proposed the nation’s first “public” school, the life of D.B. Roark thus parallels the evolution of public schools in the South between 1872 and 1944. 

In his early years, Roark had no intention of becoming a teacher. Yet financial indebtedness after one year at Carson and Newman motivated him — at age eighteen — to teach for a three-month term at the one-teacher Salem School in his home district of James County. After three years of other short-term, one-teacher schools, followed by six months of the inspired and enthusiastic teaching skills of Albert Holbrook at the National Normal University in Lebanon, Ohio, Roark decidedly chose the career of a public school teacher — oddly at at time when Tennessee was measured as the most illiterate of all states. We then see him continue his education at Peabody Normal College in Nashville while teaching at other one-teacher schools before being employed in Hixson, Tennessee, as principal of one of the first high schools in Hamilton County. We follow our subject he moved to southeast Texas to join his parents and siblings in a close-knit, almost class-like family setting that would strengthen through the years. We then see him grow as a principal and head of ever-larger schools in Texas before spending four years in homesteading a quarter-section land grant in easter New Mexico, living hermit-like in a dugout on his claim before returning to Texas as superintendent of three Texas school districts.