The
name “Rebecca Smith Pollard” rings no bells in my beady little brain, and
neither does her pseudonym, “Kate Harrington.” But the blog post in “The
Writer’s Almanac” for September 20, 2011, puts me
strongly in mind of my own elementary school education and of my subsequent
avocation, living history programming.
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| Rebecca Smith Pollard 1831-1917 |
Born Rebecca Harrington Smith in Allegheny City,
PA, (now part of the city of Pittsburgh) on September 20, 1831, Pollard grew up
in a literary household. Her father, N. R. Smith, was a playwright and taught
Shakespeare. She had three older siblings.
She started teaching in Kentucky, an occupation
which in the mid-19th Century was usually reserved for men. She
taught primarily in private schools for girls. She moved on to teach in Iowa,
and spent most of her professional life in several Iowa cities. A little later
in life, she taught in Chicago. Her writing career began early, when she contributed
to a column in the Louisville [KY]
Journal. Rebecca’s “Letters from a Prairie Cottage” included a section for
children, with fanciful tales about animals. One such tale was about a cat
which adopted orphan chicks. (The strong anti-secession editor of the Louisville Journal
was a major influence in keeping Missouri in the Union.)
After moving to Farmington, IA, in her early 20s, she met Oliver I. Taylor, a
New York poet and editor of the The Des
Moines News, the Burlington Argus, and other Iowa newspapers. They married in 1858, and in addition to
her other work, Rebecca worked with her husband on these periodicals. They had
one daughter. Tragically, Taylor died of diphtheria less than three years after
their marriage.
In 1862, she remarried to James Pollard, an Iowa
state senator, politician, and banker, gaining four step-children. Within eight
years, she and her second husband added four more children to the family, one
of whom died in infancy. This marriage may have been rocky: in 1877, Rebecca is
recorded as raising the children alone in Fort Madison, Iowa. James is
recorded as having lived until 1902; he died in Missouri.
She wrote several children’s books, and in 1889,
she developed and published a reading primer and a speller called Synthetic Methods. By the turn of the century, her reading
program, “The Pollard Series” school texts, with reading books, spellers, and
teachers’ manuals, was adopted by every state in the Union.
What made her reading program unique was fueled
by her own teaching techniques and the observations she made from the results.
Preceding living history programming in today’s schools, Pollard had her
students learn American history by reenacting battle scenes with broomsticks.
She initiated the study of fractions by using apples. After observing means of learning
among children, she initiated a method to teach reading by developing the
students’ ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phenomes – the sounds of
syllables and words – and correspond them with the spelling patterns
(graphemes) of those syllables and words. This work was the forerunner of the
modern phonics system of study.
Pollard also wrote poetry and a novel, under the
pseudonym Kate Harrington. Maymie, a book of poetry published in
1869, was a tribute to her daughter who died that year, only ten years old. In
1876, she published a second book of poetry, Centennial, and Other Poems, to commemorate the country’s 100th
birthday. The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was the first world’s fair
held in the United States. Pollard included in this book selected poems written
by her father, and illustrations from the Exhibition.
Her novel, Emma
Bartlett: or Prejudice and Fanaticism, was a fictional response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which she exposes “the
hypocrisy of Know-Nothingism and the dogmatism of Abolitionism.” It was
published by “An American Lady” in 1856, copyrighted by “R. H. Smith” (as yet
unmarried), and met with mixed reviews, no doubt because of the volatile nature
of the subject. Booksellers often marketed these books to be sold as a pair.
In addition to her essays, newspaper articles,
novels, poetry, textbooks, and children’s books, Pollard wrote hymns. She used
a number of pseudonyms besides “Kate Harrington,” including Ola and Gertrude
Atherton.
Pollard died in Fort Madison, IA, on May 17, 1917.
What rings a bell for me after studying this
little bit about Rebecca Smith Pollard is that a few poor Catholic nuns taught
me, using the phonics method when I was an elementary school student. This
system gave me an unshakable foundation in reading and writing, for which I am
eternally grateful. I don’t see that in most schools today, and it is a loss to
the students.
The Pollard post in "The Writer's Almanac" rings another bell, too, for
she pioneered a hands-on approach to learning history, over one hundred years
before living historians and re-enactors like me began bringing history into
the classroom regularly as part of the modern education system’s cultural
enrichment programming.
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| Building a model Civil War signal tower |
Imagine being able to talk to an historical
figure, famous or not, to ask him or her about clothing styles and
hearth-cooked meals three hundred years ago. Imagine the fun in learning how to
measure the school playground with an old-fashioned surveyor’s chain, and
calculating the distance using links and rods.
As a living history presenter, there’s nothing
like the spark of passion that lights up a child’s eyes when he or she learns
history – or any subject - hands-on. We never had anything like this when I was
in school. I wish we had.
SOURCES
“The Writer’s Almanac” for September 20, 2011 http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/09/20
Biography for Rebecca Smith Pollard,
Pennsylvania Center for the Book https://secureapps.libraries.psu.edu/PACFTB/bios/biography.cfm?AuthorID=7837
“Kate Harrington: An American Lady,” Marie
Haefner, The Palimpsest 38 (April 1957), Iowa State Historical Dept., Div. of
the State Hist. Soc.
“Kate Harrington (poet),” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Harrington_%28poet%29
“Rebecca Pollard: ‘An
American Lady’,” Grace Vyduna-Haskins, History of Reading News, Vol. XXV No. 1,
Fall 2001, pp. 6-7.
A Literary History of
Iowa, Clarence A. Andrews, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, IA, 1972.
Postscript at the end of Chapter 1: “Poet on the Prairie,” p. 5.
“Reminiscences of Henri K. Pratt of Keokuk,”
Annals of Iowa: A Historical Quarterly, Vol. 5, Third Series, ed. by
Charles Aldrich, Historical Dept. of Iowa, Des Moines, 1901-1903. p. 418.
“Phonics,” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics
Pollard and spelling book images taken from Wikipedia.
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