If Miss Alice Craig had been born in 1972 instead of 1872, no doubt, with her keen intellect and family background, she would have had many career paths to choose from. However, in her lifetime, many professional fields were closed to women. Like many other brilliant women at that time, Miss Alice spent her entire adult life teaching children.
For most of her seventy years, Miss Alice lived with her two sisters, Miss Minnie and Miss Birdie, in the small town of Piedmont in the house her grandfather Gilbert Craig, had built in 1850. At one time the Craig house had been one of the finest homes in Piedmont. Their grandfather, Gilbert Craig, one of the early settlers of the town, owned a large, prosperous farm. When the two story farmhouse was built, it was surrounded by Craig's farmland. The farm was gone by the 1890's, replaced by the cotton mill and a large mill village. Now the Craig house set in the middle of the mill village less than a block from the cotton mill.
Miss Alice was my eighth grade homeroom teacher for a few months. She was also my Latin teacher. I remember how she looked that year. She was slender, her plain face rather wide with high cheekbones. With her gray hair pulled back into a bun, her shapeless drab-colored dresses, her sensible oxfords, and her rimless glasses perched on her nose, she looked very old to me. I had hoped I wouldn't be placed in her homeroom, because her reputation for being a strict teacher and disciplinarian was already legendary. But, for those few months I had her, we got along fine.
In November of that year, 1941, just before World War II began, Miss Alice became ill and never returned to school. Our new teacher, beautiful young auburn-haired Miss Barnes, daughter of the local Methodist minister, was a great improvement over Miss Alice, most of us thought.
When Miss Alice died in January, I don't remember any particular grief being expressed by any of us. I don't think she inspired affection or love among her homeroom students during the few weeks we had her. Instead, she inspired respect, along with a healthy dose of fear.
Our attitude was not the prevailing one. The older students and many men and women in Piedmont who had been her students in the past truly mourned her. As far as I know, the death of no other teacher in Piedmont has ever received the reaction the death of Miss Alice did. She had taught in the Piedmont schools for many years and had gained a well-deserved reputation throughout the community and much of north Alabama of being an excellent teacher.
The superintendent of schools and the Board of Education decided to acknowledge her contribution to education in Piedmont by having her lie in state in the central hallway of the high school on the day of her funeral. All the classrooms, grades seven through twelve, filed past the open coffin to view Miss Alice. As I remember, it was a quiet and orderly viewing. While an appreciation of the dignity of the occasion played a role in the good behavior of most, some might have feared that, if they talked, even in death, Miss Alice might rise up to reprimand them.
After the viewing, Miss Alice's coffin was taken a block away to the First United Methodist Church where she had been a member for many years. Then the students were lined up and marched to the church to attend her two o'clock funeral. I don't know how many students there were, and though I suspect many dropped off along the way, still Miss Alice's funeral service must have had the largest attendance of any held in that church before.
The funeral didn't end the tribute to Miss Alice. Before long, a large oil painting of Miss Alice hung in the hallway above where her coffin had been placed. The senior class of 1942 commissioned a bust of her to be placed in the school. As far as I know, the painting and the bust are both still there, although I'm sure most of the boys and girls who walk by them know nothing of Miss Alice's story.
I didn't know Miss Alice's story either until a few years ago when a friend of mine, whose mother was her good friend, began telling me a little about Miss Alice's life away from school.
It may be trite to say that everybody has a story, but everybody does, and the little that Joseph told me about Miss Alice and her sisters made me want to learn more.
Joseph said, "My mother always said no one in Piedmont knew the family responsibilities Miss Alice had. Miss Minnie was her biggest worry, and Miss Alice told my mother several times that Minnie would never be sent to the mental hospital in Tuscaloosa." And she wasn't, he said. Although it was a financial struggle for her, when Miss Minnie had her bouts with her mental problem, Miss Alice sent her to a private hospital for a while.
Miss Minnie had some sort of mental problem? I'd never heard that. Joseph then went on to tell me about Edgar, their younger brother. As a young man, Edgar began to display the symptoms that eventually required his commitment to the State Hospital for the Insane in Tuscaloosa. He remained there the rest of his life, and, when he died in the 1940's, was buried on the grounds of the hospital.
While many in Piedmont were aware the Craig sisters had a brother in the hospital in Tuscaloosa, I doubt many knew about Miss Minnie's "problem ." Was she bi-polar? It's possible. She functioned very well most of the time. She gave piano and violin lessons to numerous children in Piedmont until she was quite old. In later years she could be seen many Fridays at the Greyhound bus station waiting for the bus that would take her to Birmingham where she played violin with the Birmingham Symphony.
Where Miss Alice was reserved and serious, Miss Minnie was friendly and outgoing. On warm weekend summer afternoons when families in the mill village gathered on their front porches, Miss Minnie could often be seen walking along the sidewalk, an umbrella over her head to protect her from the sun.
Her sisters were home. Miss Alice might have been working on the history of Alabama, an unfinished book found among her papers after she died. Or she could have been putting the finishing touches on one of the articles she had published in national magazines during her lifetime. I can picture Miss Birdie painting, her easel placed near a window to get the best light. The house would be quiet.
Too quiet for the gregarious Miss Minnie. She went walking to visit for a while with some of those families sitting outside.
The youngest sister, Miss Birdie, was different from both Miss Alice and Miss Minnie. The town thought of her as a recluse. A talented artist, she had taught art in the local high school for a short while when she was a young woman. When that ended, she never worked again and spent the rest of her life taking care of the house and doing her painting. She rarely ventured out of the house. In all the years I lived in Piedmont, I don't recall ever seeing her. When my brother Tom delivered groceries to the Craig home in the late forties, he found her to be a sweet lady, and lonely, glad to have someone to talk to.
Was it her younger sisters' problems that brought Miss Alice back to Piedmont in 1915? She had been gone from Piedmont for a good many years teaching in other towns. She was making a life for herself apart from her family. Or was this about the time her brother Edgar's mental problems began? Or was her elderly father ill and no longer able to look after the family? Although I don't know what specific problem brought her back to Piedmont, I'm sure that any one of these would have provided the incentive for her to return.
As the oldest daughter, she probably felt it was her duty to look after the family. Whatever the reason, she did return, never to leave again.
When Miss Alice came home, she had no trouble getting a position teaching history and Latin at Frances E. Willard High School. With her educational background she could probably have gotten a teaching position anywhere in the country. Few, if any, of the teachers she worked with could match that background. After graduating from high school, she had attended Isbell Presbyterian College in Talladega.
She taught for a few years before traveling to Virginia to enroll at Mary Baldwin College. With her degree from there in hand, she began teaching again. She didn't stop going to school though. Several of her summers were spent studying at a college in Asheville, North Carolina.
Obviously the educational system in Piedmont appreciated her qualifications. After teaching seven years at Frances E. Willard High School, Miss Alice was made principal of the school in 1921. Women high school principals were a rarity in the 1920's.
From all reports Miss Alice was a strict but fair administrator and worked hard to make Frances E. Willard a good school. Realizing the importance for the school to be accredited, she spearheaded the effort to achieve that goal. She had been principal almost 10 years when, in 1931, shortly after the move into the new building, Piedmont High School, as it was now called, received accreditation.
That must have been a proud day for Miss Alice. The newspaper, The Birmingham News, sent a reporter to Piedmont to write a complimentary article about Miss Alice, depicting her influence in the community and in the school.
The euphoria Miss Alice must have felt following that happy day didn't last long. Bad news soon followed. Miss Alice was told by the Board of Education that accreditation standards required the principal of a high school to have an administrator's certificate. Since she didn't have one, she couldn't serve in that position any longer. According to the rules, she would have to return to the classroom.
I'm sure Miss Alice had been aware of that requirement all along but had assumed that she would be 'grandfathered in' and given the opportunity to work toward the required certificate. She wasn't. A man soon arrived to replace her as principal, and Miss Alice began teaching Latin and history as she had done years before. She continued in that position until her final illness.
I can only imagine how angry and hurt Miss Alice must have been when she was removed as principal. A proud and dignified lady, I'm sure only her family and closest friends knew her real feelings. She was not a woman who would have wanted people in the community referring to her as "poor Miss Alice."
I do wonder though. Were there some who felt Miss Alice had been treated badly? When the Board of Education decided to bring her body to lie in state at the school and to close school for her funeral, did a little bit of shame for their treatment of her in the past play a role in that decision? I like to think that it did. We'll never know.
Learning some of Miss Alice's story has resulted in my seeing her in a different light. As a teenager I only saw her as a one-dimensional character — a good but strict teacher. I view her differently now. I see a woman with a great sense of duty — in both her personal and professional lives. When her family faced serious problems, Miss Alice believed it was her duty to return to care for the family she deeply loved.
A gifted educator, it would have been easy for her to become bitter following her dismissal as principal of the school she had worked so hard for. She could easily have become one of those teachers most of us have known at some time, a teacher who shows up for work but performs as little as possible. But she didn't. Her love of teaching and her sense of duty to her profession wouldn't allow her to give anything but her best to her job.
While Miss Alice's life might have been different if she had been born a hundred years later, when women had so many more career choices, can anyone say her life would have been any better? Although she never married, she still had a family to love and care for and a profession she loved. And Miss Alice had influenced the lives of two generations of young people. Most of us would say that, by the standards of any generation, Miss Alice had a successful life.
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