Pearl Murphy Wright

Image source: Miss Pearl Wright

Pearl Murphy Wright was the eldest child of the founding president of East Carolina Teachers Training School, Robert Herring Wright (1870-1934) and his wife, Charlotte Pearl Murphy (1876-1965). Although born in Baltimore, Wright moved to Greenville and the campus of East Carolina Teachers Training School in 1909, the year her father took a new position as president of the school. In addition to having spent a major portion of her youth at ECTTS, she enrolled at East Carolina Teachers College in 1921. Few early alumni could claim to have spent more time around the new campus than Wright.

Active in student life, Wright served as historian for her freshman class, and then as president of the Edgar Allan Poe Society her sophomore and junior years. During her sophomore year, she was chairman of the Presidents Club. She also served as critic for her junior class. Her senior year, 1925, Wright served as the sergeant at arms for the senior class, and as chief marshal for the Poe Society and assistant business manager of the Tecoan. She was also a member of the Inter-Society Committee her sophomore and junior years.

In her senior entry in the Tecoan, Wright somewhat jokingly stated that her ambition in life was “to teach in Goldsboro.” As things turned out, she went much further from home than that. After graduating from ECTC, she first went into teaching in Wilmington, N.C. for two years before teaching for a year in Raleigh. Then, after finishing a master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, she joined the staff at the Horace Mann School in Manhattan, in the fall of 1929.

Although Wright had “emphatically declared her purpose of becoming an old maid” in the senior class “Last Will and Testament” in the 1925 Tecoan, while in New York, she met her future husband, M. Donald Cadman, of Pleasantville, N. Y. Cadman graduated from the School of Pharmacy at Columbia University, and was an assistant professor there for two years after his graduation. The couple resided in Manhattan initially, but later moved to New Castle, Westchester County, N.Y. Following her marriage, she travelled several times to Great Britain and around the U.S. She passed away in 1972, the last of her immediate family, having been preceded in death by parents and all of her siblings.

Sources

• “Miss Pearl Wright Wed to M. Donald Cadman Yesterday.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. June 21, 1930. P. 5.
• “Other Marriage Plans.” The New York Times. June 21, 1930. New York, N.Y.
• Tecoan, 1924, 1925. Greenville, N.C.: East Carolina Teachers College.

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