January last. On his next visit mention is made of Stanhope School with George Douglas as teacher. Probably the Stanhope children attended this school while it was located in Covehead. But on the other hand, there may have been an earlier unrecorded school in Stanhope; in the 1841 census Jenny Leech, widow of Peter Leech J r., is listed with the comment liveth in an old school house. As far as we know, there was no new school house in Stanhope until 1851, let alone an old one.

Given the great value traditionally set by the Scots on education, it is probable that the adult settlers from the Falmouth could read and write; their signatures on the 1803 petition to Montgomery about James Curtis vary from excellent to laboured. They had access to books The people of Cove Head and St. Peter’s were not without knowledge, for they had good books, which they lent to one another according to the Rev. James D. McGregor in 1791; he also stated that Parson DesBrisay had a good-like library and a large one, con- sidering the place. So before the advent of a school, the settlers may well have taught their children to read; some would have learned out of the family Bible. But it must have been hard for parents to find the time to teach their children, when every effort was needed just to survive in the wilderness; thus many of the second generation settlers may have been illiterate. William Hudson was one such, he was a successful farmer with over 100 acres of land, a large stock of animals and a high record of production, but he could only‘ ‘make his mar ”, signing documents with an “X”. And in 1802 John Hill stated m 2 Memo- randum that William Lawson can just read and write.

With regard to eighteenth century handwriting, when reading the microfilmed documents of this era, one becomes able to spot at a glance the beautiful “copper plate” of professionals, such as that of Ludovic Kennedy, Junior writer to the Signet (who drew up the contract between James Montgomery and David Lawson); the equally beautiful but less legible hand of James Douglas, the second Montgomery agent, the rather “crabbed” writing of Sir James him- self; and the characteristic script of David Lawson. Though deceptively neat-looking at first sight, David’s writing is quite difficult to decipher, what with the long “S” of the period, the generous use of capital letters, and the somewhat erratic spelling. (His writing is so characteristic and consistent, that the present writer has been able to recognise it in a dream, which unfortunately did not last long enough for the message to be transcribed). Even if Lawson was not good at keeping accounts, he wrote well.

To return to education in Stanhope, in 1884 the School District No. 30 in Queen’s County was defined as follows: What is to say beginning at the head of Covehead Bay at Duncan MacLaughlin’s