Cyrus Spottswood Shippen

Born in 1876 in Washington, DC, Cyrus Spottswood Shippen was the second eldest of John and Eliza (Spottswood) Shippen’s twelve children. His father, a minister and teacher who may have been born into slavery, graduated from Howard University. His mother was a landowner in the Barry Farms-Hillsdale (Anacostia) section of Washington. Two of Cyrus’s siblings graduated from Oberlin College. The family spent summers on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation of Long Island, New York, where their father taught and pastored. Cyrus Shippen married Harriet L. Shippen; the parents of two children, they later divorced. Like several of his family members, Shippen followed a career in education. For many decades he taught social studies at the M Street High School and Armstrong High School in Washington, DC, retiring in 1946. He died in 1966 at the age of 90.