Malcolm R. Peacock was for many years a teacher prominent in the public schools of Georgia, having spent the major part of his life in the schoolroom. Later he became one of the leading merchants of Thomasville. with a branch store in what was then McDonald (now Pavo), Georgia, and one in Boston, Georgia. In his old age he retired to his farm near Pavo, where he could enjoy a more quiet life aside from the heavy responsibilities and cares of the ever-hustling business mercantile life. He married Miss Lelia Culpepper, a daughter of William H. Culpepper, a native of Thomas county, who was a leading farmer in Georgia for many years, but who later moved to Florida where he purchased an orange grove.

The children of Malcolm are: Emmitt, Wallace, Wesley and Howell (twins) and Mabelle. Daniel Clayton is a graduate of the University of Georgia and also of Harvard, Massachusetts. He came from Harvard to Atlanta and established his school, “Peacock’s School for Boys,” in 1898. He now has a handsome three-story building in the finest residence part of the city, the school numbering one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty boys from the age of twelve to eighteen, the annual receipts from which are eight or ten thousand dollars.

Professor Clayton has a summer residence in Pavo, where he spends a part of the summer and winter, hunting during the winter and fishing during the summer and looking after his varied interests, including his large cotton ginnery and cotton warehouse, etc Wesley Peacock, next to the youngest of the family of nine, was born near Thomasville, Georgia, on December 24, 1865.

(Editor’s Note: Wesley Sr is the father Wesley Peacock Jr. the founder of PFAS.) At the age of fourteen he entered the South Georgia College in Thomasville, where after an attendance of four years, he was graduated in 1884 with first honor of his class and with a commission as first lieutenant in the military department. At the age of eighteen he taught school, the following year in Okapilco and in Stockton, Georgia, and was thus prepared to enter the University of Georgia in October, 1886, having received the appointment as a beneficiary of the Charles McDonald Brown scholarship fund by courtesy of ex-Governor Joseph E. Brown, of Georgia, which enabled him to graduate in the university in 1887 with second honor in his class. Mr. Peacock values a personal letter and a photograph from Governor Brown, received while teaching school in Texas two years after graduation, in recognition of his having been the first beneficiary of the Brown fund to repay the obligation.

On December 28, 1893, he married Miss Selina Egg, and in 1894 he established the Peacock School for Boys in San Antonio, Texas, which grew into the Peacock Military College, an institution enjoying the distinction of having been the first school in Texas or any gulf state to be classed A by the war department. One son, Wesley Peacock, Jr., survived the death of his wife on November 28, 1898. On July 4, 1903, he married Miss Edith Wing in Chicago. (Editor’s Note: Wesley Peacock Jr is the person who created the Peacock Family Association of the South)

In 1911, after persuading congress to name Corpus Christi, Texas, as a site of a marine school under government patronage, Professor Peacock established and maintained in that city the Peacock Naval School in connection with the Peacock Military School of San Antonio, obtaining from the navy department navy cutters and other naval equipment.

Wealthy (Wessie), the twin sister of Professor Wesley, was educated at Young’s Female College, Thomasville, Georgia, and died shortly afterwards with typhoid fever, at the age of eighteen, in the bloom of life. She was a devoted Christian and member of the Methodist church. She contracted the fever while in the performance of her Christian duties in attending the bedside of a sick neighbor, and was interred in Laurel Hill cemetery, Thomasville, Georgia. Thus her life was sacrificed in the service of her Master, but not in vain.

John Howell Peacock was also a graduate of the University of Georgia. He was head master for three years in Peacock’s Military College at San Antonio, Texas, after holding chair of mathematics in San Antonio’s Female College. He is now head master of Peacock’s School for Boys, Atlanta, Georgia. Professor Howell married Miss Meda Perkins, of Alice, Texas, who was a graduate of San Antonio’s Female College. The names of their two children are: John Howell, Jr., and Evelyn Louise.

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