Well, nobody can say these two students had common names! America Fuqua and Saluda Fuqua were students at the Mordecai School in its later years, 1816 to 1817 for America, and 1816 to 1818 for Saluda. The adult name attached to their account is Samuel Fuqua. Also, my dissertation appendix says that Saluda was born in 1805, and died in 1886. So that's a lot to start with, for a change...
America and Saluda were the daughters of Captain Samuel Fleming Fuqua (1787-1820) and Prudence Ford Fuqua (1787-1813). A few years after their mother died, their father placed them at the Mordecai School.
Saluda Baker Fuqua (1805-1886) was born in Charlotte County, Virginia, when both of her parents were 18 years old. She was 16 when she married William Henry Browne Christian in 1821, the year after her father died. The Christians had six children. After she was widowed, she married again in 1847, to William Harloe Watson, and had one more child. She lived in Douglas County, Kansas, in her later years, and died there in 1886. Her eldest daughter America Fuqua Christian (born 1824) married Daniel Woodson, who was the acting Territorial Governor of Kansas several times in the 1850s.
Saluda's younger sister America E. Fuqua (born 1810) was a student at the Mordecai school when she was a small child of 6 and 7 years, but her older sister was also there. She died young, before 1830.
These girls had another sister, Evaline Ann Frances Fuqua (1807-1832) But I don't see any evidence of her attending the school, and she may have had chronic health issues. Evaline lived with Saluda and W. H. B. Christian in her last years. Their only brother, La Marquis Washington Fuqua (1810-1846, known as Marc) also died young.
A last note: The source of America's first name is obvious, but Saluda's name origin may be less so. Saluda River, Saluda Mountains, Saluda, North Carolina, and Saluda County, South Carolina, are all Southern placenames, but not very close to where Saluda Fuqua was born or lived. (There is also a Saluda, Virginia.) But the name seems to come from a Cherokee word, Tsaludiyi, meaning "green corn place".
