Sadie Ingram’s House (4517 41st Avenue)

North Brentwood’s schools, like the town itself, originated in its earliest history as Randalltown. Students were taught in the private homes of residents who recognized the value of education, literacy, and knowledge––emphasized, as Frank Harold Wilson described, by the “93 percent of residents who indicated the ability to read and write in the 1920 census.” North Brentwood’s young students continued to remain a central part of the town’s priorities for improving the lives of its residents throughout its long history.

Beyond North Brentwood’s formal school buildings built between 1902 and 1944, as discussed later in the tour, the town’s origins with resident-led schooling continued through at least the late 1930s in a private school led by Sadie (Johnson) Ingram at 4517 41st Avenue, formerly known as Highland Avenue. First documented in the 1910 Federal Census as Sadie Plummer Johnson, a public-school teacher living in Hyattsville and granddaughter of Adam Francis Plummer, Ms. Ingram later moved to North Brentwood where she taught children through the sixth grade out of her home. As Elsie L. Fleming recalled, children from Hyattsville and Bladensburg–as well as North Brentwood–were students in Ms. Ingram’s private school. Other residents, including Evelyn L. James, noted that Ms. Ingram had rooms along her living and dining rooms where “each room was a separate grade.” She had “little wooden desks set up with little chairs for the kids [and] the blackboard was all around in the rooms.”

Sources

“Early settlers of Hyattsville, Maryland, Nicholas and Fannie Plummer, seated with family in 1899.” Sarah M. “Sadie” Plummer Johnson Ingram is shown standing, at top right, with her parents and siblings. (Courtesy of Paul Johnson in Frank Harold Wilson’s Footsteps from North Brentwood: From Reconstruction to the Post-World War II Years, 1998, p. 26)