Columbia, though behind Charleston in point of time, made an equally good beginning in spite of annoying handicaps. There was a fertile field here for teaching, since the blacks were crowding in from all the surrounding territory. Sherman having destroyed about all the suitable buildings, T. G. Wright, representative of the New York Society, in company with three northern ladies, started a school on November 6, 1865, in the basement of a Negro church with 243 scholars. Soon thereafter, on November 7th, another was begun in the small room of a confiscated building "very unsuitable for a school room." On the same day two other schools were begun at similar places, one of them at General Ely's headquarters and taught by his daughters. On the ninth another school started on Arsenal Hill in an old building rented for a church by the freedmen and on the thirteenth still another was opened in one of the government buildings. These schools were numerically designated as "No. 1," "No. 2," etc., being nine in all. In addition to these there were two night schools begun about the same time, one of them enrolling fifty adult males and the other 121.[50] The Columbia schools were taught wholly under the control of the New York Society by northern ladies with the assistance of a few Negro instructors who were competent to assist them. They had a large attendance and consequently there were many changes made in the location of schools in the course even of the first few months. Fortunately these temporary congested quarters gave way in the fall of 1867 when the Howard School was completed. This school was erected by the New York Society and the Freedmen's Bureau at a cost of about $10,000. It contained ten large class rooms. At the close of the school year (1868) it had an attendance of 600. The closing exercises of the year seemed to have attracted considerable attention inasmuch as the officers of the city, Tomlinson, and newspaper men all attended. The examinations at the close embraced reading, spelling, arithmetic, geography, history and astronomy. _The Columbia Phoenix_ (a local paper) said of the exercises: "We were pleased with the neat appearance and becoming bearing of the scholars ... and the proficiency exhibited in the elementary branches was respectable."[51] The New York Society did its best work in Columbia. At Beaufort this same organization had schools which occupied the large buildings formerly used by the whites. The New England Society was best represented at Charleston and Camden. The Philadelphia Society was best represented at St. Helena. Some notion of the exact location of the schools fostered by these societies (May, 1866) may be gained from the following table:[52] Number of Town teachers Support