SARAH WOODSON EARLY, an educator and Temperance advocate On November 25, 1825, Sarah Jane was born to Thomas and Jemina Price Woodson, the youngest of eleven children. The family then lived in Chillicothe, Ohio. According to family tradition, her father Thomas was the son of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. The family moved to Berlin Cross Roads in Jackson county in 1829, where they established a settlement of African Americans. It appears that Sarah was a brilliant individual. At the age of five years, she memorized large sections of the Holy Scriptures and could sing some of the hymns of the church at age three. She joined the Berlin Cross Roads African American Episcopal Church in 1840. Sarah, like other members of her family attended a school "for colored children" in Berlin Cross Roads. She attended this school until she was fifteen, and then went to the Albany Academy in Albany, Ohio. After finishing her studies at the Albany Academy , she transferred to Oberlin College and graduated in 1856. After graduation from Oberlin College, she taught school in a number of communities in southern Ohio. In 1859, she was hired by Wilberforce University to teach English and Literary Studies. She was the first woman of color to teach there. The faculty at that time was mainly male and white. She taught school in, Chillicothe Circleville, Portsmouth , Zanesville and in Berlin. Sarah served as the principal of the Hillsboro Colored Schools and then became the principal of the Colored School in Xenia, Ohio. She held the position in Xenia until the close of the Civil War. She was persuaded by the Freedman's aid Society to journey to Hillsboro, North Carolina to be the principal of one of the largest Colored schools in that state. It had been impossible to keep male principals here. However, she successfully headed that school though there were many difficulties and dangers. She met a Baptist minister, Rev Jordan W. Early, whom she married on September 24, 1868. The two newlyweds left Ohio for Nashville, Tennessee, where she taught school and her husband pastored a church. The couple moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1870, where she was the principal of one of the public schools in that city. In addition, Sarah helped her husband in the work of pastoring a church by teaching Sunday School, leading prayer service and by raising funds for the support of the church. She taught a total of thirty-six years and eighteen of them in Tennessee. She was interested in the Temperance Movement that swept the nation in the 1880's. In 1886 she was elected superintendent of temperance work among the colored people of the Southern States by the National Women's Christian Union (WCTU) and in 1890 she was appointed by the National Temperance Missionary Society as a lecturer. She traveled and lectured throughout seven states in the next four years. At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Sarah Early was named "Representative Woman of the Year." She and her husband continued to live and work in Nashville until his death in 1903. Sarah died at the age eighty-three in 1907. They had no children.

Sources

Katz, William Loren, Black Pioneers: the Untold Story, Atheneum , a division of Simon and Schuster. New York. 1999.
Majors, MA M. D., Noted Negro Women Donohoe and Hennberry, Chicago. 1892. Re-release by Arthur W. McGraw, Columbus, Ohio. 1997.
Scruggs, L A, AM, MD. Negro Women of Distinction, Raliegh, North Carolina, 1892 Woodson, Minnie Shumate.

The Woodson Source Book ,Washington D.C. 1978. Smith, Robert, Family data base, 1996.

Interviews with members of the Woodson family.

Records of the Oberlin College, 1905.

Records of Birth for Ross County, Ohio.

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