Finally, a school for black children
Founded during slavery, Rowe’s Corner institution holds special place in history
MORE THAN two centuries after the Moravians landed in Jamaica, a little girl named Lucinda Beverley (now known as Lucinda Grace Peart) was born. By age 12, she had conquered the highest levels of educational assessment in Jamaica for pupils, becoming a teacher at 14 years and two months.
Now months away from her 80th year, tall, stately and with graceful gait, she recounted how she blossomed from a seed planted in Germany from the lips of Anthony Ulrich, which landed on the fertile ears of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorft.
It was the seminal plant out of which grew the beginning of a school in 1823 at Rowe’s Corner in Manchester, the site where the Moravian missionaries established the first school for the education of the children of slaves in Jamaica.
It’s a history the widowed Peart – mother, grandmother, teacher, lecturer, administrator, historian, liturgist and hymn writer – knows very well.
EXTRAORDINARY FEAT
More than 30 years her junior, the Reverend Charmane Daley is only the ninth woman to be ordained a minister in the Moravian Church, an extraordinary feat first hurdled by Penelope Morgan. Daley is now minister at the Lititz Moravian Church, which was first established in 1838 and restored in 2007. It sits on a hill and surveys thousands of acreage once under Moravian ownership, but which now hosts modern housing stock, agricultural production and bauxite operations.
Proud, with slightly greying, low-cut hair, the slender woman with big eyes, dark skin and gentle persuasive voice described her own challenges in communities in the northern end of the parish as a minister. She was determined to grow like the seed planted by Ulrich.
“It has been a rough one. My first charge was in Langton, Lacovia Moravian churches, and at that time, the mentality of wanting a male minister was rife.
“They wanted a male – not a young female, and certainly not someone who does not wear hat to church. I didn’t fight it. I stayed there for 10 years, and they didn’t want me to leave,” she told The Sunday Gleaner. She would move on to the Bethlehem Teachers’ College (now Bethlehem Moravian College), where she spent five years as chaplain before becoming minister at Lititz in St Elizabeth for eight.
Less than 100 metres from the church is the Lititz Primary and Infant School, the site where the Rowe’s Corner school was relocated to in 1826. The original wattle and daub structure is well preserved and provides classrooms for several grades. More than 200 students are on roll at the school, which currently conducts some face-to-face classes after satisfying the Government’s requirements to reopen amid the pandemic.
Curious eyes peered out as the Sunday Gleaner team pulled into the schoolyard last week. About 10 students were on the playground, yards apart from each other, having fun.
“You will find a Lititz in the UK, USA and wherever the Moravians have been. I wasn’t taught about Lititz, specifically. I am a Moravian. I went to Moravian College, and I would have learnt about the early Moravians and what they did. When I came here in 2015, there was no Moravian on staff. I tried to incorporate our history, even a little bit at a time at devotions,” said Principal Karlene Reid-Foster.
Grades three and four are taught culture and community studies as well as a bit of the church’s history.