1908 National Education Association Spelling Bee facts for kids
Quick facts for kids 1908 NEA Spelling Bee |
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Individual champion Marie Bolden.
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| Date | June 29, 1908 |
| Location | Hippodrome Theater, Cleveland, Ohio |
| Winner | Cleveland (team), Marie C. Bolden (individual) |
| Sponsor | National Education Association |
| No. of contestants | 60 |
| Pronouncer | Solomon Henry Clark |
The 1908 National Education Association Spelling Bee was a team-based, inter-city spelling bee held on June 29, 1908, at the Hippodrome Theater in Cleveland, Ohio. Predating the 1st Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1925 by seventeen years, this 1908 competition was the first national spelling bee in the United States. Cleveland won the team competition, and Marie C. Bolden was the individual champion.
Competition
The spelling bee was part of the forty-sixth annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA), which was held in Cleveland. The NEA invited teams to compete from across the United States and promoted the competition as the first national spelling bee. Six thousand people, including convention speaker Booker T. Washington, attended the event at the Hippodrome.
Unlike the later Scripps National Spelling Bee competitions, the 1908 NEA Spelling Bee was an inter-city contest, with teams of fifteen eighth-graders each participating from Cleveland, Erie, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans. For the competition, each student took a written spelling test of one hundred words, and then spelled four words aloud on stage. The total number of spelling mistakes in both the written and verbal competitions determined the winning team.
The Cleveland team won the competition with the fewest errors, followed by Pittsburgh in second place, New Orleans in third place, and Erie, Pennsylvania in fourth. Marie C. Bolden, a thirteen-year-old black girl, was the only Cleveland speller with no errors, so she was named the individual champion and received a gold medal.
