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Mrs. Samantha Jane Neil
Amelia County – One of the 53 sites along the Civil Rights in Education Heritage Trail®. In 1865 Mrs. Samantha Jane Neil left her home in Pennsylvania to search for her husband’s body. He had been a Union army officer and had died somewhere in Amelia County only a few days before Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. Though she never found her husband’s remains, she did discover a serious need for education for Virginia’s freed slaves. Later that same year Mrs. Neil set up a school under a “venerable oak tree with spreading branches.”
