May is the birthday month for legendary Battle Mountain teacher and school principal, Mary Scott Black. Born on May 30, 1881, the third of 10 children, Black was a native of Wisconsin and attended the Wisconsin State Normal School. When she graduated in 1906, booming Nevada communities had begun advertising all over the country for teachers. She taught briefly in her home state, but by 1912, she had responded to one of those ads and was employed in Ely.
Black taught in eastern Nevada for about a decade and then resigned to attend school in New York City. In 1923, she graduated from Barnard College at Columbia University with a Bachelor of Science in Education and Practical Arts, which was, for the time, an advanced teaching degree. Black returned to teach in Goldfield.
In 1925, she became Deputy State Superintendent for the region that included Lander County. The 1926 election resulted in a new State Superintendent, which was then a partisan position, and deputies for the former Superintendent were out of a job at the end of the year. The Battle Mountain Grammar School Board engaged Black as Principal, a position she held for nearly two decades. During that time, she piloted the school through some of Nevada's most turbulent economic years.
Early in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the closure of the Battle Mountain State Bank separated depositors, including the local school district, from their funds. Principal Black became distressed for her teachers who were not being paid and concerned, too, about her own finances. "Things are bad here," she wrote to her brother, explaining that she had "lived for over a month on two dollars." Black worried that she could not pay her landlady, who was also strapped for cash, and that stores would stop extending credit. She hoped the bank would be closed for only a few months. As it turned out, the bank was closed for nearly two years.
Surviving that turmoil, Black continued to lead the Battle Mountain Grammar School until she retired in 1946. She returned in 1949 to teach fifth and sixth grades and then retired for good in 1951, moving to Florida. In 1964, the Lander County School Board named its newest school building in honor of the principal of the old building it replaced. Mary S. Black eventually returned to Wisconsin where she died in 1979 at the age of 98 years.
This story and many others from Battle Mountain's past are part of All Roads Lead to Battle Mountain: A Small Town in the Heart of Nevada, 1869-1969, which will be available in July. Please contact the Cookhouse Museum for additional information.
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