As to who Mr. Tiberius Gracchus Leonard was, or as to where he came
from, nobody in Winchester, save himself, knew.

Immediately following the close of the Civil War, Rev. Samuel
Christian, a poor but honorable retired minister of the M.E. Church,
South, was the first teacher employed to instruct the colored children
of the town.

He was one of those Southerners who had never believed in the morality
of slavery, but regarded it as a deep rooted evil beyond human power
to uproot. When the manacles fell from the hands of the Negroes he
gladly accepted the task of removing the scales of ignorance from the
blinded eyes of the race.

Tenderly he labored, valiantly he toiled in the midst of the mass of
ignorance that came surging around him. But only one brief year was
given to this saintly soul to endeavor to blast the mountains of
stupidity which centuries of oppression had reared. He fell asleep.

The white men who were trustees of the colored school, were sorely
puzzled as to what to do for a successor. A Negro, capable of teaching
a school, was nowhere near. White young men of the South, generally,
looked upon the work of teaching "niggers" with the utmost contempt;
and any man who suggested the name of a white young lady of Southern
birth as a teacher for the colored children was actually in danger
of being shot by any member of the insulted family who could handle a
pistol.