Katie Jane Peterson

Katie Jane Peterson
Retired Educator

Miss Katie Jane Peterson, 100 of Johnson City, Tennessee, died on Sunday, October 24, 2010. She was born in 1910 in Relief, North Carolina, Mitchell County, to Joseph Hendricks Peterson, a farmer, and Amanda W. Peterson, a homemaker.
Miss Peterson attended Cumberland County High School, graduating as salutatorian of her class in 1927, and Tennessee Wesleyan Junior College, graduating in 1929, again as salutatorian. She earned a B.A. as a Phi Kappa Phi graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a master’s degree from George Peabody College for Teachers, now part of Vanderbilt University.
Miss Peterson began teaching in the Cumberland County, Tennessee schools, conducting classes for all grades and in all subjects in one- and two-room buildings. Ultimately, she taught in schools in Mill Creek, Lantana, Ozone, Woody, Creston, Centers, and Westel before she transferred to Cumberland County High School in 1940 and taught English and history there for seventeen years. In 1958 she moved to Boone, North Carolina, and joined the faculty of Appalachian High School, the laboratory school of Appalachian State Teachers College. In addition to her high school classes, she taught English Methods courses to students at ASTC. When the county schools consolidated in 1965, she became a part of the first faculty of Watauga High School, where she taught and chaired the English Department for another ten years, retiring in 1975 after a forty-four-year career.
An inveterate traveler, Miss Peterson particularly enjoyed seeing the places she taught about for so long. She visited all the states of the U.S. and all the provinces of Canada, including the Yukon Territory, and spent time in Mexico, England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and China, the Fiji Islands, Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand.
Since 1989, Miss Peterson had lived at Appalachian Christian Village in Johnson City, Tennessee, where she served one term as president of the Residents’ Council.
She was a member of the Watauga Unit of North Carolina Retired School Personnel and the Tennessee Retired Teachers Association, the Boone Chapter of BPW, which established a scholarship in her honor, Delta Kappa Gamma, American Association of University Women, Phi Kappa Phi, the Audubon Society and the Red Hat Divas of Crossville, Tennessee, a chapter of the Red Hat Society. A Methodist for more than eighty-five years, she was a longtime member of Munsey Memorial United Methodist Church in Johnson City.
In 2004, she was inducted into the Cumberland County High School Hall of Fame, an honor she considered her crowning achievement.
Preceded in death by her parents and her elder sister, Mamie Lee, Katie Jane Peterson is survived by a number of cousins and hundreds of former students and friends. Her legacy is one of dedication to excellence, unending intellectual curiosity, great good humor, boundless enthusiasm, and abiding faith.
Memorials may be made to the Kate Peterson Endowment, Appalachian State University Foundation, ASU Box 32007, Boone NC 28608-2007 or to the Watauga Humane Society, 200 Casey Lane, Boone NC 28607.