Grayson County TXGenWeb

Mary Eva Crutchfield

Mary Eva Crutchfield was born to Evaline LeDocia Porter Crutchfield and John Wesley Crutchfield in Henry County, Tennessee, on Nov. 14, 1870. The oldest of seven children, Mary attended a Methodist school in Tennessee until her family moved to Paris, Texas, in 1882. The Crutchfields settled in Sherman in 1884, and Mary continued her studies at the Washington building (Editor's Note: The present Washington Elementary School on South Travis Street was built over the foundations of the original Washington building which was constructed in 1895 and torn down in 1928).

In 1897, Mary enrolled at the Sherman Female Institute, also know as Mary Nash College, where she studied for two years. Jesse G. Nash, a Baptist minister, and his wife, Mary ___ Nash, had established the school in 1877 in a four-room house on West Mulberry. Mrs. Nash affixed an apt motto to the finishing school on its first day of existence and constantly said the motto before her pupils as a criterion they were expected to reach: "That your Daughters may be as Corner Stones, Polished after the Similitude of a Palace."

Mary Crutchfield graduated from the Sherman Female Institute on June 6, 1889, with a degree in literature. Following graduation, Miss Crutchfield attended Sam Houston normal in Huntsville. Her first teaching assignments were at the Fitch and Loving schools east of Sherman where she taught one term each in 1890 and 1891. The next year she taught at Hyde Park school near Denison. In 1892 she joined the faculty of the Franklin school as a teacher of fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students. Franklin, built in 1884 at the corner of Walnut and Mulberry, was the first brick public school building in Sherman.

From 1895 - 1897, Miss Mary served as a sixth grade teacher at Washington school. Then in 1898 she transferred to the high school as a history teacher. High school at that time meant grades nine and ten. These had been added to the Sherman middle school curriculum in 1893 in order to meet the demand for "higher education" which up until that time had been divided only by private schools.

The first public high school classes were held on the second floor of the Washington building. On the southwest corner of Travis and Mulberry, the first high school was built in 1898 and occupied for the first time in 1899. This building was destroyed by fire in 1907 and rebuilt in 1908.

After the addition of an eleventh grade, the school system purchased the residence of O. T. Lyon at Crockett and King, on this site a new and larger structure opened as Central High School in 1918. Come rain or shine, Miss Mary, who never owned a car, walked from her new home at 1305 South Crockett to the new Central High. Here she taught history, social studies, and economics and was head of the social studies department for the remainder of her long teaching career.

During the summers from 1914 to 1924, Miss Crutchfield attended the University of Texas from which she earned the Bachelor of Arts degree on August 30, 1924. She was one of the oldest summer students to be honored with election to
Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious academic fraternity in the United States. During the summers of 1929 and 1930, she attended graduate classes at UT.

A university professor with whom she studied in one of the summer sessions told her that she had more knowledge of historical detain than he had. The Sherman teacher replied that she had to have such knowledge; she taught inquiring boys and girls and had to have the answers.

Miss Mary always based her teaching on friendship with the students and an acquaintance with their needs and interests. "I always tried to find out what a pupil's real interests were and bring out points that would interest them most," she said, "The best teacher is the one who is a friend of all her pupils."

The friendship between teacher and student was exemplifies in the following letter written by Miss Crutchfield to Magdalen Dederick Carpenter, a 1931 Sherman graduate:

My dear Magdalen,
I can hardly decide where I have enjoyed you most, or on what subject you have been most satisfactory , - I think I have rarely enjoyed a more satisfactory pupil in my classes and yet - I shall think of you oftener after I meet you no more in the classroom for our talks on other than school subjects. I shall remember your love of home, of home making, of friendships and friends, of flowers and in fact all of those things which go to make a womanly woman. I shall be disappointed if the opportunity of becoming life long friends is not possible, but at any rate I have known and loved you in Sherman High.
Mary Crutchfield

About Miss Crutchfield, Mrs. Carpenter wrote: "She always seemed to bring out the best in her students and always encouraged when the going was tough. I have never known a more dedicated teacher. My senior year I took an Economics class on my lunch hour as an elective just to be in one of her classes again."

On Nov. 14, 1933, to celebrate her birthday and fortieth anniversary as a teacher in Sherman, a surprise reception was planned for Miss Mary by her former pupils, co-workers, and charter members of her Sunday school class at Travis Street Methodist Church.

"Well, for the first time in my life I have nothing to say," Miss Crutchfield exclaimed as she came into her home to find it elaborately decorated with autumn flowers and crowded to capacity with her friends and pupils. Seated in a large chair in the center of the living room, the teacher was presented with cards, letters, telegrams, at least a dozen boxes of cut flowers, and numerous gifts including a diamond bar pin and $200.

The following is but one of the expressions sent in by friends of Miss Crutchfield on this occasion:
It was my good fortune to be associated with Miss Crutchfield in the teaching profession for a number of years and I know of no teacher who has taught in the Sherman public schools who wielded a better influence for good than she. Her general regard for her students and her overflowing kindness made life happier for those who came in contact with her. Teachers may come and teachers may go, but Miss Mary Crutchfield will go on forever. - R. M. Carter

The following spring Mary Crutchfield retired from a teaching career that spanned forty-four years. Miss Mary continued with her favorite activities: gardening, tending her chickens, rocking on the front porch, crocheting, reading and visiting with her friends. These were the days before a teacher retirement system, and in order to meet expenses, Miss Mary converted her house into two apartments, living upstairs while renting out the downstairs.

One day while Miss Mary was shopping uptown, a fire broke out in the downstairs apartment. Though the house suffered extensive damage, that afternoon found Miss Mary, in her rocking chair, not on the front porch, but out on the front lawn, receiving visitors as usual. News of Miss Crutchfield's plight reached former students scattered across the country, and generous contributions were sent to help Miss Mary repair her beloved home.

During an interview in 1951 when she was eighty years old, Miss Crutchfield observed that school methods had changed a great deal since she began teaching in 1890. "Children don't do as much memory work as they used to. They used to memorize Whittier and Lowell and Tennyson. Nowadays they know a lot more than we did - about television and cars and such things - but they know very little about poetic things that we knew."

Shortly after midnight on Aug. 2, 1952, Miss Mary suffered a stroke and died fourteen hours later. She was buried in West Hill Cemetery on Aug. 4.

On Sept. 15, 1952, a petition signed by 254 Sherman residents was presented to the Sherman Board of Education; the petition requested that the elementary school under construction on South Dewey Avenue be named in honor of one of Sherman's most illustrious teachers, Mary Crutchfield.