Jackson, Ruth W., 1830-1994

Biographical Note

Leroy Freeman Jackson, born July 15, 1881, in London, Ontario, Canada, moved with his family to North Dakota in the early 1890s. Jackson received his bachelors degree in 1902 from the University of North Dakota. In 1905 he married Emilie Caroline Baehr; they had two children, Robert Charles and Ruth Allene. In 1909 Jackson received his masters degree from the University of Chicago and in 1912 he went to Harvard for a year to conduct research under Frederick Jackson Turner. After several years of holding teaching positions throughout North Dakota and Minnesota, Jackson began teaching at the State College of Washington in Pullman, where he ultimately became acting Head of the Social Science Division. His teaching career was put on hold during World War I, when in 1917, Jackson went overseas to serve as first lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Corps. He later served with the Army Educational Corps as the conductor of the Citizenship Institutes. In 1921 he moved to Burnsville, North Carolina to become director of the Stanley McCormick School (which later became the Carolina New College), an experimental progressive education school funded by Nettie Fowler McCormick. When the school closed down in 1928, Jackson became Dean of the College of the City of Asheville in North Carolina.

Jackson went to work for the U. S. Indian Service in 1932 and would spend the next four years working with Native American students. The Indian Service first sent him to Alaska to be the director of the newly established Wrangell Institute, which included students from the Tlingit and Yakama tribes. In 1934, Jackson was sent to Fort Wingate, New Mexico to work with the Navajo as director of the Charles H. Burke School. In 1935 he was transferred to the Taos Day School. In 1936 Jackson retired from teaching and moved to Olympia, Washington where he worked for the State Department of Social Security. Jackson was the author of several published articles, monographs, and children's books of nursery rhymes, including The Peter Patter Book (1918) and Jolly Jinks Song Book (1922). He died in Pomona, California in 1958.

From the guide to the Leroy F. Jackson Papers, 1830-1994, (The Huntington Library)