By Jody Record, Media Relations
November 29, 2006

Elizabeth Virgil by Grant Drumheller

On the first floor of the Dimond Library, just inside the door, hangs a large painting of a graceful looking woman in a beautiful pink dress. In one hand she holds reading glasses; in the other, a piece of paper; sheet music, perhaps, for the piano behind her.

There’s nothing in the portrait, painted by art professor Grant Drumheller, that indicates the significance of his subject; a small plaque on the frame tells that story. Her name, Elizabeth Virgil, is on top and below, it says "First African-American woman to be graduated from UNH".

That was in 1926. Virgil left Durham with a bachelor’s degree in home economics and a yearning to become a public school teacher. A short time later, she moved south to fulfill her dream. It would be another 40 years before New Hampshire schools would hire blacks.

The granddaughter of a slave, Virgil was born April 29, 1903, in Plymouth, Mass. When she was quite young, her father, who was afflicted with poor health, moved south. Around 1912, her mother took her three daughters to Portsmouth where a friend assured her she could find work.

Virgil was 9 years old. But she remembered that time and her life in the tenement building on the corner of Court and Atkinson Streets where she grew up. More than 75 years later, she shared details of those years with historian Valerie Cunningham, founder of Portsmouth’s Black History Trail. She had interviewed Virgil as part of an oral history project on the Seacoast’s black elders.

Cunningham learned that Virgil had always dreamed of going to college. Her mother worked for two women—Virgil referred to them as “suffragettes”--who happened to belong to a women’s college club.

“They knew Elizabeth was smart and wanted to go to college,” Cunningham said. “They also knew her mother couldn’t afford it. So, they arranged for her to get a scholarship.”

After graduating UNH, Virgil moved to Virginia and taught at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute in Petersburg. She also worked at the Bowie Normal School in Maryland. It was there at Bowie that Virgil helped graduates from rural schools train to become teachers.

“She was teaching at country schools. They were segregated, of course,” Cunningham said. “Many of the students were very poor. They were tenant farming families so, at harvest time, they worked the farms instead of going to school.”

That meant some of her students were a lot older—and a lot bigger—than others.

“She was a little tiny thing. Some of the students were bigger than she was. She told me she learned pretty quickly to show them who was boss,” Cunningham said.

At one school, Virgil also served as the athletic director but told Cunningham she never understood why.

“The only thing she could figure was it was because she had Red Cross training,” Cunningham said.

During her last teaching position, at the Smithfield School in Smithfield, North Carolina, Virgil also directed a church choir and a girls’ singing group. She returned to Portsmouth when her mother became ill. It was the late 1930s-early 1940s and she still couldn’t teach in New Hampshire.

Her first job in Portsmouth was demonstrating new gas appliances for the gas company. Next she got a part-time job as a secretary in a doctor’s office and, from there, went to work at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as a clerk typist.

While teaching Sunday school at the People’s Baptist Church, Virgil integrated plays and poetry into her lessons. This was during the first half of the 20th century when there were few black churches. Parishioners were traveling from outside the Seacoast to attend People’s Baptist.

“She was teaching African culture at a time when people hadn’t thought of it,” Cunningham said. “And she would share stories; she loved to travel and made several trips to Europe and India.”

In 1951, in a move that brought her full circle, Virgil returned to UNH, working as a secretary in the soil conservation department for 22 years. She retired in 1973.

Her continued love of learning fostered the establishment of the Alberta Curry Virgil Scholarship in memory of her mother. Virgil was a life member of the UNH President’s Council.

Virgil died in 1991.

“There are these paintings hanging in different buildings on campus and I think we forget about the people,” Cunningham said of Virgil’s, and other notable portraits. “It’s nice to let a new crop of people know who she was.”