HICKEY, ELIZA (1836-1893)

HICKEY, ELIZA, teacher; b. Newcastle, Jun 1836 (bap. 11 Jul 1836, 5 wks.), d/o John Hickey and Mary McCarroll, natives of Ireland; unmarried; d. Chatham, 10 Oct 1893.

Eliza Hickey, "first class teacher," announced in The Gleaner in September 1856 that she was conducting a school in the Mechanics' Institute hall in Newcastle. She was enumerated as a teacher in the census of 1861, at which time she was still living with her parents. In 1872 she was hired as teacher of the advanced department at Harkins Academy. Her examiners declared her to be doing "excellent work" in 1875 in overcrowded conditions. They described her teaching in similar terms in their 1877 report and praised the appearance of her classroom, in which "numerous symmetrical designs adorned the blackboard." In 1878, while the four other women teachers at Harkins were earning $250 annually, she had a salary of $340. Her income was sufficient to allow her to have a room at the Waverley Hotel, where a number of other unmarried persons of professional status were boarding.

Hickey left her Newcastle position in the fall of 1883 and joined the staff of the Wellington Street school in Chatham, of which Crawford M. Hutchison, her former principal at Harkins, was head. At the tenth annual meeting of the Teachers' Institute in 1886 she made a presentation on the teaching of arithmetic and was also elected vice-president of the institute. Around 1891 she was forced to retire due to illness. At the time of her death in 1893 she was residing with her sister Ellen and brother-in-law James Hickey.