Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Thomas Jordan Jarvis (1836-1915) served North Carolina as a teacher, lawyer, lieutenant governor, governor, ambassador to Brazil, and U.S. senator. Yet at East Carolina University, Jarvis is best known as the founding father of the school’s first incarnation, East Carolina Teachers Training School, and as the namesake of one of the oldest buildings on campus, Jarvis Residence Hall.

Although initially skeptical about the need for a teachers training school, Jarvis eventually embraced the idea and lent the full measure of his political clout to the cause, helping thereby to secure legislative passage of the bill that Senator James L. Fleming introduced. Moreover, Jarvis served as the chair of the Building Committee and effectively oversaw the design, layout, construction, and equipping of the original campus. Jarvis also led the search that resulted in the hiring of the first president, Robert H. Wright, and several of the founding faculty. Upon his passing in 1915, Jarvis was mourned throughout the campus, community, and the state for his contributions to the progressive development of North Carolina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As with his Democratic contemporaries, Jarvis’s progressivism was operative within the “separate but equal” segregated world of Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) and Jim Crow. In 1898, Jarvis campaigned alongside Charles B. Aycock and other Democratic leaders as an advocate of “white supremacy.” In the following years, he publically lent his support, in major statewide newspapers such as the News and Observer, to the constitutional amendment restricting the franchise to those who were literate. This amendment, ratified by the North Carolina electorate by a substantial majority, effectively disenfranchised much of the African American male population. Illiterate whites were allowed special privilege: they could vote until 1908, at which point they too would have to prove their literacy. To bolster literacy and the white vote, East Carolina Teachers Training School was established to educate, as its charter stated, “white men and women.” Implicit but clear was that with education came mass literacy, and a white electorate to ensure future Democratic success. Jarvis, a lifelong Democrat and advocate of white supremacy, surely saw ECTTS through such lenses. Though a progressive in his dedication to the cause of education, he never transcended the segregation mentality of his day that led to the separation of the races, and a racially divided educational system statewide, from primary schools through the university.

Sources:

• Downs, Gregory P. “University Men, Social Science, and White Supremacy in North Carolina,” Journal of Southern History (May 2009), Vol. LXXV, No. 2, pp. 267-304.
• “Four Thousand Heard Them: Jarvis and Overman at the Asheboro Rally,” News and Observer (Sept. 10, 1898), Issue 3.
• “Governor Jarvis on the Effect of the Proposed Constitutional Amendment Regulating Suffrage,” News and Observer(August 24, 1899).
• “Jarvis and Aycock,” News and Observer (June 18, 1898), p. 5.
• Jarvis, Mary. “The Conditions that Led to the Ku-Klux Klans,” North Carolina Booklet, Vol. I, no. 12 (Raleigh: Capital Printing Co., 1902), pp. 3-24. And, “The Ku-Klux Klans,” North Carolina Booklet, Vol. II, no. 1, pp. 3-26.
• Yearns, Buck, compiler and editor, The Papers of Thomas Jordan Jarvis, Volume 1, 1869-1882 (Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1969).

More from Digital Collections