Mrs. Fannie Carter, Educator, Dies at 100
Charleston Daily Mail
March 30, 1973
A Charleston woman who celebrated her 100th birthday last Sept. 30, and was widely known in educational circles, died Thursday flight at St. Francis Hospital following a long illness.
Mrs. Fannie Cobb Carter graduated from Storer College in Harpers Ferry in 1891, and later attended Oberlin College, Ohio State University, Columbia University and several other institutions.
Mrs. Carter traveled in the United States and abroad for education purposes.
Mrs. Carter, who was born in 1872, the year before the first train came through Charleston, kept abreast of current news.
She was against strip mining and last year, during an interview, explained:
"I would rather see little children playing on the hillsides. And I like to see cows and horses there."
An early riser, she always voted before breakfast and confided that she "used to be a staunch Republican but found out all the devils aren't on the Democratic side. Sometimes I vote the other way now."
She didn't like the idea of calling Negroes "blacks." She preferred to talk about "just people" instead of blacks and whites.
Mrs. Carter never met Gov. Moore but she remembers when George Wesley Atkinson was governor in 1899.
"He invited Booker T. Washington back to West Virginia and had him go all over the state," she said.
She danced at a reception honoring the prominent Negro educator.
She was born in a house on Dickinson Street, between Quarrier and Lee streets.
She was superintendent of the first West Virginia industrial School for Colored Girls in Huntington, dean of women for 17 years in the National Trade and Processional School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., and taughe [sic] elementary school ia Charleston.
Mrs. Carter in 1909 instituted the teacher training department at West Virginia State College, then known as West Virginia Collegiate Institute where she worked several years.
She later returned to private business in Charleston where she became a charter member of the Women's Improvement League.
There are no immediate survivors.
The body is at Preston Funeral Home.