Pool, Eliza Anne

By William S. Powell, 1994

12 Nov. 1849–25 Nov. 1935

Eliza Anna Pool, teacher, was born in Oxford, the daughter of Thomas Wyatt and Sarah Dorothy Hicks Pool. She attended the schools of Oxford and achieved such an outstanding record in Latin that Professor James Horner of the Horner Military Institute in Oxford invited her to study Latin with his class of boys. Her first employment was as a teacher in the Oxford Orphanage for a short time, and then she taught for two years in the Reidsville schools. Returning to Oxford, she taught briefly at Hobgood's School for Girls. In 1886 she moved to Raleigh and thereafter devoted forty-five years to the teaching profession. During summer vacations she attended The University of North Carolina, Amherst, Columbia University, and other schools and at one time took two years (1924–25) off to attend the Sorbonne in Paris and study in Switzerland and Germany. She became proficient in ancient Greek and read modern Greek, Spanish, and Italian; she spoke French and German as fluently as she did English.

Eliza Pool taught in and was principal of several schools in Raleigh, including the Murphey School and the Wiley School, and then taught Romance languages in the Raleigh High School. For a year she was lady principal of St. Mary's Junior College in Raleigh. In June 1926 she was chosen North Carolina's most outstanding teacher and represented the state at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Celebration, at which she and a teacher from each of the other forty-eight states received gold medals. It was in 1926 that the Raleigh Township School Committee named the public school at Caraleigh Mills the Eliza A. Pool School. In 1927 an oil portrait of Miss Pool was presented to the Hugh Morson High School.

Miss Pool was an Episcopalian and taught Sunday school at Christ Church in Raleigh. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.