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Early Years
Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry was born on June 5, 1825, in Lincoln County, Georgia. He was the son of William Curry, a merchant and member of the state legislature, and his first wife, Susan Winn Curry. As a young man he changed his middle name from Lafayette to Lamar. His mother died in 1827, and two years later his father married a widow with one son. Curry was educated in the local schools and for one year at Willington Academy, a school in Abbeville County, South Carolina, established by the noted educator Moses Waddel. In 1838 Curry’s family moved to Talladega County, Alabama.
Cooke, Giles Buckner (1838–1937) – Encyclopedia Virginia encyclopediavirginia.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from encyclopediavirginia.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Richard Ratcliffe Farr was born on November 30, 1845, in Fairfax County and was the son of Richard Ratcliffe Farr, who died about ten weeks before he was born, and Margaret Conn Willcoxon Farr, who reared him and his elder brother. During the Civil War, he and his mother lived as refugees in Washington County after the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862. On November 2, 1863, he enlisted as a private in Company B of the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Regiment, under the command of John Singleton Mosby. One year later Farr was severely wounded in the thigh, but he recovered and served until paroled in Winchester in April 1865.
Before the Civil War none of the states south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers had public school systems. In the 1780s and 1810s the former governor Thomas Jefferson recommended creating a statewide school system, and the governors David Campbell and James McDowell made similar recommendations in the 1830s and 1840s. But the Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830 refused even to debate a proposal that the state take responsibility to educate its children. White Virginians who could afford it hired tutors or sent their children to private schools. By the middle of the nineteenth century numerous academies for both boys and girls operated throughout Virginia, and some Presbyterian, Catholic, and Episcopal churches sponsored schools. The General Assembly did little more than authorize counties to establish schools for educating paupers. That system, some Virginians complained to the assembly in the mid-1850s, “has been a failure. It has failed to enlist public confidence, because it h