On May 29, 1892, Rebecca Oliver was born at the Oliver home in Coke where she lived until her marriage in 1916. The Oliver home offered a stable family environment undergirded by strong religious convictions.

Gloucester County experienced an epidemic of scarlet fever during the 1890s, and several members of the Oliver family, including Rebecca, became victims of this plague.  Rebecca’s case was extremely severe; at one point there was no hope of her survival; Jack and Lulie, thinking that death was imminent, laid out her funeral clothes.  At the deepest point of despair, Rebecca’s fever broke, and she began to recover.  One aftereffect of the sickness was loss of memory and speech; she later recalled, “I had to learn to talk all over again; I had to relearn my ABCs; I even had to be taught to say, ‘Pappy.'”  Another side effect was the loss of hair; Rebecca said, “My hair came back straight, but Edith’s came back curly.”

Access to public education was almost an impossibility for the Oliver family during the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Jack Oliver solved this problem by building a schoolhouse in the yard and hiring a school teacher. Neighbors’ children attended this school as well as the Oliver children.  The first teacher in the Oliver school was Miss Maude Brandon.  After teaching several years, Miss Brandon married William Hogge and moved to Cappahosic.

After Miss Brandon moved away, Jack Oliver employed Mr. S. P. Brohawn as schoolmaster; Mr. Brohawn lived in the Oliver home and clerked in the Oliver store when school was not in session.  Mr. Brohawn had a unique system of discipline; on the first day of the school year, he lined up all the students and gave each one a paddling, saying, “If you don’t need it now, you will before the year is out, so let’s get it over with.”  The spelling bee was a prominent part of the school’s curriculum, and Rebecca  excelled in this exercise.  That system of instruction must have worked for when Rebecca was in her nineties and her memory had failed in most respects, she could still spell the most difficult words.

Many years after Rebecca’s schooling, when an application form asked for “grades completed” in school, she was somewhat perplexed, saying, “We didn’t have any grades; we all studied in one room with the same teacher.”  When asked, “If you had no grades, when did you graduate?”  “We didn’t graduate,” she replied.  “If you didn’t graduate, when did you know you had finished school?”  “I went to school until I knew as much as Mr. Brohawn did, and then I stopped,” she replied.

Over the years, Rebecca developed a respectful attachment to Mr. Brohawn, who remained with the family after “the family school” was no longer necessary.  During Mr. Brohawn’s final sickness, Rebecca attended his needs under the doctor’s instructions, cleaning and bandaging sores.  The doctor said that she had a natural talent to be a nurse, but Jack Oliver scoffed at the idea thinking that nursing was not a respectful occupation.  As Mr. Brohawn’s condition worsened, Rebecca contacted his family in Maryland; a letter dated July 2, 1914, addressed to Rebecca T. Oliver, Coke, Va., was written in response to Rebecca’s efforts to maintain contact with Mr. Brohawn’s family.

When Rebecca was a teenager, she was a close friend with a cousin, Ruby Brown, and was Ruby’s maid of honor in her wedding. The following is the wedding announcement in the local paper:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a while, Rebecca worked as a governess in the home of her former school teacher, Maude Hogge. Mrs. Hogge had become an invalid, and Rebecca’s job was to oversee the education and general  upbringing of the Hogge’s two children, a boy and a girl.  Rebecca became very fond of the Hogges, and her first born son, Brandon, was named after Maude Hogge’s maiden name.

 

 

 

In 1914, Rebecca become a notary public as certified in the document below.  In 1918, this certification was renewed after her marriage.