He was made a member of the Executive Committee, faithfully attended all its sessions, and participated intimately in every important plan.  All such bodies have their decorative members and their working members; Page belonged emphatically in the latter class.  Not only was he fertile in suggestions, but his ready mind could give almost any proposal its proper emphasis and clearly set forth its essential details.  Between Page and Dr. Buttrick, Secretary and now President of the Board, a close personal intimacy grew up.  Dr. Buttrick moved to Teaneck Road, Englewood, where Page had his home, and many a long evening did the two men spend together, many a long walk did they take in the surrounding country, always discussing education, especially Southern education.  A letter to the present writer from Dr. Abraham Flexner, the present Secretary of the Board, perhaps sums up the matter.  “Page was one of the real educational statesmen of this country,” says Dr. Flexner, “probably the greatest that we have had since the Civil War.”

And this Rockefeller support came at a time when that movement known as the “educational awakening” had started in the South.  In 1900 North Carolina elected its greatest governor since the Civil War—­Charles B. Aycock.  A much repeated anecdote attributes Lincoln’s detestation of slavery to a slave auction that he witnessed as a small boy; Aycock’s first zeal as an educational reformer had an origin that was even more pathetic, for he always carried in his mind his recollection of his own mother signing an important legal document with a cross.  As a young man fresh from the university Aycock also came under the influence of Page.  An old letter, preserved among Page’s papers, dated February 26, 1886, discloses that he was a sympathizing reader of the “mummy” controversy; when the brickbats began flying in Page’s direction Aycock wrote, telling Page that “fully three fourths of the people are with you and wish you Godspeed in your effort to awaken better work, greater activity, and freer opinion in the state.”  And now under Aycock’s governorship North Carolina began to tackle the educational problem with a purpose.  School houses started up all over the state at the rate of one a day—­many of them beautiful, commodious, modern structures, in every way the equals of any in the North or West; high schools, normal schools, trade schools made their appearance wherever the need was greatest; and in other parts of the South the response was similarly energetic.  The reform is not yet complete, but the description that Page gave of Southern education in 1897, accurate in all its details as it was then, has now become ancient history.

IV