NEWS
By Cassandra A. Fortin and Cassandra A. Fortin,special to the sun | September 3, 2006
For decades, Christine Presberry Tolbert watched the slow deterioration of the one-room schoolhouse that generations of her family attended. She feared that the rich history of the Hosanna School in Darlington and of its students would be demolished along with the dilapidated structure if she didn't try to save it. In 1982, Tolbert went before the General Assembly seeking money to restore the schoolhouse to its original state and establish a museum....
NEWS
By CASSANDRA A. FORTIN and CASSANDRA A. FORTIN,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | February 5, 2006
In the late 1800s, school started at 9 a.m., when the teacher rang a brass handbell to summon the pupils. The children sat on backless benches and wrote their lessons on slates they held in their laps. In the 1940s, a teacher woke early to get to the school and fire up the potbelly stove so the building would be warm for the arrival of students, some of whom walked seven miles. In those days, all the students walked. Established in 1867 as Harford County's first public school for blacks, the Hosanna School in Darlington boasts a rich history.
NEWS
October 23, 2005
1867: SCHOOL FOR `COLORED PEOPLE' On Oct. 26, 1867, Joseph Peaker and several trustees of the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church arranged to build "a school for the colored people of Havre de Grace." The Anderson Institute was built on Stokes Street on land that Peaker inherited from his father, Cupid Peaker, and sold to the trustees. Though the institute no longer stands, the Hosanna School remained in its place for many years. Cupid Peaker and his sons Joseph and James were at the forefront of the struggle for equality in Harford County.
NEWS
By Anne Lauren Henslee and Anne Lauren Henslee,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | April 25, 2004
Fifty years ago next month, the U.S. Supreme Court voted unanimously that the doctrine of "separate but equal" had no place in the public school system, marking the long process of desegregating America's public schools. Yesterday, several dozen residents gathered inside the one-room, wood-frame building that until 1946 served as the Hosanna School in Darlington, Harford's first public school for African-Americans. Established in 1867 by the Freedman's Bureau, Hosanna is now a museum and national historic landmark.
NEWS
By Luciana Lopez and Luciana Lopez,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | September 21, 2003
Not all of Gladys Williams' pupils could afford their own tin cups when she was a teacher. Williams would show them how to make cups for the day out of a sheet of paper, so they could have something to hold water from the blue bucket filled each morning from a nearby spring. It was the 1940s, and the war was on. Resources were scarce all over - but even scarcer at Hosanna School north of Darlington, where Williams taught: She and her pupils were black, and the school, in the Berkley community in northeast Harford, was an outpost of segregation.