The story etched on the back of her grave marker in Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery credits Sophia Arms Partridge with the idea to create a resting place there for Confederate soldiers. In 1889, the Raleigh Daily Call reported she "first conceived the idea of having a collective place of interment for the dead boys in gray, and to her belongs the credit of suggesting and mainly organizing the first Confederate cemetery." Seventy-five years ago, there were still some who had first-hand memory or had heard stories of Miss Partridge. Susan Iden shared her stories.
Among my earliest memories is that of the stories told me by my mother and grandmother of Miss Sophia Partridge's School in Raleigh. Miss Partridge has been dead more than half a century, her death occurring in 1881, but so vital was her personality and so great was the contribution that she made to the educational life of early Raleigh, that she still lives in the memory of old time residents....
Sophia Arms Partridge was born May 15, 1817, in Vienna, New York. On account of the ill health of her sister she came South. After several years in Louisburg, she came to Raleigh in 1846 and opened her Select School for Young Ladies on the lot where the Thompson School is now located, corner of Swain and Hargett Streets. The school was the first boarding school in Raleigh.
There was a little frame building that Miss Partridge bought and enlarged into a two story building with a long porch across the front with wings at each end that were used as school rooms. ...
Miss Partridge taught her pupils much besides the three R's. She was a woman of great culture and refinement. She taught her pupils art and music and fine needlework. She also taught them manners. The young ladies were drilled in how to enter and leave a room. No young lady would have thought of crossing her knees or of showing more than an enticing glimpse of slender ankles. At certain times calling days were observed among the students. They dressed in their best attire and came calling on the teachers and again they would act as hostesses and the teachers would come calling on them, all lessons in proper etiquette.
Miss Partridge was assisted in the school by her sister, Martha, who died young, by her sister Carolina, Mrs. James F. Jordan, and by her aunt, Mrs. Bobitt, whose husband taught a school for boys on the block just below on Hargett Street. Students came from as far distant as Mississippi. The instruction was thorough. One of Miss Partridge's admirers said that she had an admirable disposition and never lost command of her temper. She was talented in painting landscapes, figures, fruits and flowers and received many prizes from the State Fair on her paintings.
One of the things that endeared Miss Partridge to Raleigh people was her loyalty to the South and her work for the Confederacy. Coming to Raleigh just before the Civil War, she allied herself with the South. She formed sewing clubs for the soldiers and taught girls how to make bandages and dressings. She was secretary of the Ladies' Memorial Association.
Letters written by Miss Partridge in 1861 are full of politics and the War and what she was doing for the soldiers. In one of them she referred to letters she had received from Northern relatives and said: "Two of them made me so mad that I have not answered them yet." ...
The letters are charmingly written, news of the neighborhood, of her school, of moss landscapes she was doing, of romances and engagements of friends, of the weather and events of Christmas, bedquilt making, spring gardening and all that goes into the day. Letter writing in those days was an art.
Miss Partridge's school was started September 1st, 1836, and was continued until 1865, with a break between 1851 and 1858, when there was no school. Fortunately, her old roll book ... has been preserved. The record is in the finest penmanship.... So far as I have been able to find only two of her pupils are alive today, at least in Raleigh ..... There are, however, many of the children and grandchildren of Miss Partridge's pupils who remember very vividly the stories of the old school as told them by their parents and grandparents. ...In her later years Miss Partridge developed asthma, or perhaps it was consumption as it was called in those days .... Her friends came to see her in her lovely room, with its fine furniture, its fourposter bed with its immaculate bed linen and coverlets, its chairs with frilled chair covers. I heard a woman, who lived near Miss Partridge as a little girl, say that she used to wish that she would soon grow up and have consumption and lie in a big white bed and look as lovely as Miss Sophia did and have her friends come to see her. -- The News & Observer 1/23/1937
