Mary Smith Kelsey Peake (1823–22 February 1862), educator, was born in Norfolk and was the daughter of Sarah Kelsey, a free African American, and a white Englishman or Frenchman who paid for her schooling. Her parents were unable to marry legally under the laws of Virginia. When she was six, her mother sent her to live with her aunt and uncle to attend a private school for African Americans in Alexandria, which was then part of the District of Columbia. She later attended another school taught by a white Englishman at the First Baptist Colored Church (later Alfred Street Baptist Church). While in Alexandria, Kelsey lived in a house owned by Rollins Fowle. He was a white man who purchased enslaved people, including her uncle, who were at risk of being sold to cruel owners, granted them freedom, and helped them to establish a business.
About 1839, after returning to her mother's home in Norfolk, Kelsey's firm religious convictions led her to join the First Baptist Church on Bute Street. In 1847, Kelsey and her mother moved to Hampton, where her stepfather, Thompson Walker, was the enslaved foreman of a nearby plantation and a founder of Hampton's second-oldest African American church, Zion Baptist Church. While supporting herself as a successful seamstress, Kelsey began teaching from the family home, secretly instructing African Americans of all ages, both free and enslaved, including her own stepfather. Local white officials seemingly did not interrupt her school in spite of state laws that made it illegal to conduct schools for African Americans.
In 1851, Kelsey married Thomas D. Peake, a formerly enslaved merchant mariner of exceptionally light complexion, dark wavy hair, and blue eyes, who could easily pass for a white man. He owned a house and a farm and worked as a servant at the local Hygeia Hotel. The Peakes were considered one of the most prominent free African American families in Hampton. Their modest residence was one of the most valuable properties that African Americans owned in the city and served as a meeting place for men and women who were involved in Christian ministry. Peake continued to teach as she had before her marriage. They had one daughter who was born in 1856.
In April 1861, as the Civil War broke out in Virginia, the United States Army at nearby Fort Monroe occupied Hampton, where people who escaped from slavery sought refuge and freedom. That summer more than 900 men, women, and children entered the fort. Among them was the family of Peake's brother-in-law William Roscoe Davis, who ministered to people who had escaped from slavery and helped found schools for them. The commander at the fort declared the refugees to be contraband of war and ordered the army not to return them to slavery. Peake founded the Daughters of Zion, a benevolent association, to provide them with food, shelter, and clothing. In August, Confederates briefly occupied Hampton, at which time Peake and her family fled their home, which was destroyed when the Confederates burned much of the town.
Several missionary societies based in the northern states formed to help refugees from slavery. After the Confederates left Hampton, the American Missionary Association sent Lewis C. Lockwood there to start a Sabbath school. On 17 September, the association opened its first school to educate African Americans and hired Peake to be the first teacher, but she refused to accept a salary. The school was located near Fort Monroe, within the present grounds of Hampton University. At first, Peake taught classes underneath a large oak tree, later known as the Emancipation Oak Tree. Enrollment grew from six to more than fifty students, including her daughter, in a matter of days, and the school soon occupied a house near the Chesapeake Female Seminary. Classes met on the first floor, and the Peakes lived on the second floor.
During the day Peake taught children reading, writing, and math, as well as the Bible, examining scriptures line by line to make sure that they understood their meaning. She also incorporated the singing of hymns into her curriculum. In the evenings, despite her deteriorating health, Peake taught a class of about twenty adults, most of whom arrived in Hampton illiterate. She also helped representatives from the American Missionary Association begin schools in Newport News and Norfolk. By 1862, about five hundred students had attended the association's schools where Peake and others taught, the first schools in the South in which African American teachers educated large numbers of African Americans.
Peake maintained her grueling schedule until her health failed and she collapsed at the end of 1861, but she continued to teach from her bed. A shocked representative of the American Missionary Association pleaded with her to end her class, but she insisted that she must help her people until her last breath. Mary Smith Kelsey Peake died of tuberculosis on the night of 22 February 1862 and was buried in Elmerton Cemetery, in Hampton, where she was remembered with a gravestone inscription as the "First Teacher of the Freedmen at Fortress Monroe, Va." Her school is considered as a precursor of Hampton University, and both a school and a street in Hampton are named for her.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in Lewis C. Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe (1863), with year of birth, date of death, and frontispiece portrait; reports of Lewis C. Lockwood and other agents, 1861–1862, and one letter from Peake to "Bro. Joslyn" [Simeon S. Jocelyn], Jan. 1862, American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans; Robert Francis Engs, Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (1979); Betty Mansfield, "That Fateful Class: Black Teachers of Virginia's Freedmen, 1861–1882" (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1980), 75–77; Robert G. Murray, A Documented History of the First Baptist Church Bute Street, Norfolk, Virginia, 1800–1988 (1988), 67–68; Gloria Seaman Allen, "Equally Their Due: Female Education in Antebellum Alexandria, Part Two," Historic Alexandria Quarterly 1 (Late Summer 1996): 11–12; Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander, An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads (2010).
Image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Diana Kristine Durham.
How to cite this page:
Diana Kristine Durham, "Mary Smith Kelsey Peake (1823–1862)" Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Peake_Mary, accessed [today's date]).
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