Friday, March 30, 2018

Myra "Lena" (SHORT) Lovell, Teenage Schoolteacher




Born December 1880 in Kansas, Lena SHORT and her family moved to Orange County when she was five. At the young age of 15, she was given a contract to teach in Orange County Schools for a seven (7) month period. Her teaching assignment though was in a remote corner of South Orange County. Out of a $25 monthly salary, Lena had to pay room and board of $8 monthly to live with a family of six, four of whom being the young teacher’s students.

Lena left her Orlando home aboard a horse drawn wagon in October of 1895 to begin her first teaching assignment on a farm seven (7) miles south of Pine Castle. Years later she wrote of her assignment, saying this of her sleeping quarters:

“I was shown my room. It was what is known as a ‘shed room’. That is, one end of a porch had been boarded up. It had a stationary, one pane glass window with a nice scrap of lace curtain over it, a homemade bed with native moss mattress and a pillow, and a small table once known as a washstand with a towel bar at each end. The floor, of course, was far from water or air tight – being a porch – and the cracks between the boards were wide enough to run a lead pencil through. If I dropped any small article woe to me – for that was the last of it. I was soon fast asleep – how long I do not know – for I was awakened by bumping and scraping under the low floor and squeals and grunts of a mother hog coming home to her lair to feed her babies in the bed she made for them and herself under my room. These hogs are infested with ‘hog fleas’ which are very large and can leap incredible distances and heights. Many a time I was obliged to get up in the dead of night that winter and shake the fleas out of my bed so that I, a tired and weary fifteen (15) year old, could sleep. It was some time before there was a rain. When it came it was in the middle of the night, and I was awakened by splashes in my face. I was obliged to get my huge umbrella and open and sit under it while the rest of the bed got a soaking.”

As an adult, Myra married Frederick Charles Lovell, the son of central Florida pioneer and first school Superintendent, William A. Lovell. Education, it seems, ran in Lovell’s family bloodlines, for this excerpt is from a story was submitted to me by another in the Lovell line, a retired schoolteacher of 50 years himself. A special thank you to the Lovell family for sharing the story of this very special #cflParadise frontierswoman.

Tomorrow - our series finale: Sisters of the old fortress

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