Lucy Robertson: Academic and Activist

While Lucy Henderson Owen Robertson (1850 – 1930) was a member of the staff of State Normal and Industrial College (now UNC Greensboro) for only a short time, she made a lasting impression on the college, the city of Greensboro, and education in the South. Robertson was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, but grew up in Hillsborough, attending Miss Nash and Kollock’s School for Young Ladies, then Chowan Baptist Institute (now Chowan University). Robertson liked to tell the story of when, as a young girl, she visited a palmist who told her fortune. When the woman read her palm, she said that Robertson’s heart and head line were parallel, and it was hard to tell which was longer. She determined at an early age, that it was her heart line.

Lucy Robertson

In 1869, she married Dr. David A. Robertson and moved with him to Greensboro, raising two sons. Perhaps unusual for women of her time, she had a career in academics.  In 1875, she took a position at Greensboro Female College (now Greensboro College) as an assistant in the Literary Department, then head of the English Language and Literature Department. She became a widow at thirty-three years of age and dedicated the rest of her life to teaching.


In 1893, Robertson was enticed to accept a position at the State Normal to teach in the Department of English and History. When the school opened in 1892, this was a combined department, but it was eventually split into separate areas and Robertson became the head of the newly established Department of History. The fact that she was made department head reflects college president Charles Duncan McIver’s willingness to hire women for important positions. McIver may have also liked the fact that she was a native of North Carolina. During the early years, the College took pride in recruiting its professors from the South, specifically North Carolina.

State Normal Faculty, ca. 1893. Lucy Robertson is on the far right

 Described as “tall and graceful, well educated, well-traveled, and vitally interested in people,” Robertson was an immediate favorite with the students of State Normal. She developed a curriculum for the History Department that stressed a “familiarity with the great names and events” and a chronological sense of history. She particularly emphasized Greek and Roman history, medieval history, English history, and U.S. history. The Department used textbooks in all classes, but also encouraged “topical study, parallel reading, and independent research in a library.”

Robertson only taught seven short years at the State Normal before returning to Greensboro Female College in 1900 to accept the position of Lady Principal, and then President. In fact, she became the first woman to hold the office of college president in the state and in the South. She remained President until 1913, when she made the decision to return to teaching. Robertson also spent time traveling both in the United States and overseas, visiting eleven countries.

Annual History Department Report written by Lucy Robertson, 1898

In 1917, as the country began to mobilize for World War I, Robertson was appointed to the Executive Council of the North Carolina Division of the Woman’s Committee.  Specifically, she was chosen as Chair of Child Welfare.  She was considered to have the credentials and experience to be an effective state representative and the connections to recruit students and faculty from North Carolina’s well-established network of women’s colleges for war work.

Robinson was also involved in spheres beyond academics, becoming involved in many organizations and president of the Western Conference of the Women's Foreign Missionary Societies, the United Society of Foreign and Home Missions, and a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Woman's Club of Greensboro.

In her later years, she continued to work, teaching “Bible and Religious Education” at Greensboro Female Academy until a few days before her death in May of 1930. She died in the infirmary of Greensboro College. She was buried in Green Hill Cemetery, Greensboro.

Walter Clinton Jackson and the Documenting of the Great War

This year marks the centenary of the United States’ involvement in World War One.  Over the course of twenty months (April 1917-November 2018), the nation mobilized its military, natural resources, industry, and citizens to fight an overseas war in Europe.  Realizing that maintaining public morale was critical to achieving victory, the federal government and the state of North Carolina promoted the concepts of patriotism, service, and sacrifice.  Here on campus, the students, faculty, and administrators of the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial College (now known as UNC Greensboro) rallied to the cause and enthusiastically supported the war effort.  Their activities included: buying Liberty Bonds, training stenographers, making bandages, conserving food, and serving as Red Cross volunteers. 

The school was also deeply involved in documenting the contributions of North Carolinians to the war.  President Foust sought to both promote and document the school as a leader in war work.  For example, President Foust had professional photographs taken of the school’s students canning food, maintaining the grounds on campus, and harvesting crops at its farm.  Copies of these photographs were sent to Raleigh as evidence of the institution’s wartime work.  Moreover, Dr. Walter Clinton Jackson, head of the State Normal’s Department of History, championed the collecting of information detailing women’s war work on and off campus. 

Dr. Walter Clinton Jackson

Responding to a July 1917 letter sent by the North Carolina Historical Committee to President Foust requesting that all “materials bearing on the war” be preserved, Dr. Jackson and the History Department took up the call to collect.  The History Department published a 1917 pamphlet that made the case for documenting women’s war work.  The pamphlet declared that “it is the purpose of the State Normal and Industrial College to make a systematic effort to collect for permanent preservation all the material related to the work of women in this great crisis, so that when the historian who tries to write of woman’s part in the life of former days, he will not lack for ample and correct records.”  The pamphlet asks the reader to direct any communication relative to this work directly to “W.C. Jackson, Greensboro, N.C.”

In 1918, Dr. Jackson and the History Department published three additional pamphlets on collecting war-related materials.  The first publication “Women and the War in North Carolina: Suggestions for the Collection of Historical Material” was widely circulated amongst students and alumnae.  The pamphlet addressed the types of materials found in each of the collecting areas.  These collecting areas included: newspaper clippings, official and semi-official documents, manuscript material, pictorial material, educational material, and propaganda.  Readers were asked to mail any war-related items to Professor Jackson so that “it may be properly filed and preserved at the State Normal and Industrial College.” 

Drawing on the materials received from throughout the state, the second publication, “The State Normal and Industrial College and the War,” detailed the college’s wartime activities that included its work with the Red Cross, the YWCA, food conservation, as well as war-related lectures presented on and off campus.  In a lengthy introduction to the pamphlet, President Foust noted that the responsibility of war work should be shouldered by students and faculty since they enjoyed the advantages of a college education.  The third publication, “Women and the War in North Carolina” was written by students Mabel Tate and Naomi Neal of the Class of 1918.  It reported on the work accomplished by the state’s women from April 1917 to April 1918.   Working with Dr. Jackson, the authors of the report summarized the types of women’s war work performed in the areas of fundraising, knitting and sewing, food production, and nursing activities.  The pamphlet also listed the types of materials being received at the State Normal.

On November 11, 1918, an Armistice was signed and the fighting on the Western Front ended.  When news of the peace reached campus, President Foust allowed students to stage a victory celebration as well as join the citizens of Greensboro for a parade downtown.  With the conclusion of the war and demobilization, many individuals and organizations began to look towards peace-time reconstruction.  The state of North Carolina recognized the need to formalize and centralize documentation efforts.  Legislators felt that these preserved records would serve to honor and commemorate the heroic efforts and sacrifices of its citizens.  In 1919, the state’s General Assembly authorized and funded the position of ‘Collector of War Records.”  The veteran and educator, Robert House was hired to serve as Collector.  To support his efforts, House decided to reactivate and broaden the wartime network of citizen historians.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Walter Clinton Jackson was recruited to help document the homefront mobilization in Guilford County.  A committee of “collectors” for Guilford County was formed in 1919.  Jackson was selected to serve as the committee’s Chairman.  Jackson and the committee developed an ambitious plan to gather documents from local government agencies, civic groups, social organizations, and soldiers.  In 1920, Robert House, the state’s “Collector of War Records,” recognized the successful work of Walter Clinton Jackson and his committee.  He urged other county collectors to embrace Jackson’s collecting model. 

Through the tireless efforts of Professor Walter Clinton Jackson, a substantial number of State Normal records that relate to World War One were preserved.  Jackson met and surpassed his charge to preserve materials relating to women’s war work for future historians.  Indeed, these records can be found both in the department of Special Collections and University Archives at UNC Greensboro as well as in the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh.