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N the year 1881 the Legislature of Alabama decided to establish a normal school for colored pupils in the town of Tuskegee, in Macon county, and appropriated the sum of $2,000 annually for the support of this school. The members of the Board of Commissioners in whose hands the Legislature had placed the control of this institution, two white men and one colored man, residents of the town of Tuskegee, wrote to the late General S. C. Armstrong, who was then at the head of the Hampton Institute, in Virginia, to know if he could recommend a teacher for the newly established Alabama school. General Armstrong was so good as to recommend me for the place, and after some correspondence I was engaged. I had graduated from the Hampton Institute about four

years before that, and after taking a course of advanced study at Wayland College, in Washington, D. C., and teaching

for two or three years in my old home in Malden, West Virginia, I had returned to Hampton, at General Armstrong's request and was engaged in teaching the Indian students there. As soon as I could arrange to leave my work at Hampton I came to Alabama.

When I arrived at Tuskegee I found that although the Legislature had appropriated money to pay the teacher, it had done nothing in the way of providing a building for the school, furniture, books or apparatus of any kind. These the teacher and the people must secure for themselves. The colored people of the community were greatly pleased at the prospect of having a school and were willing to help in every way that they could, but so far as money was concerned they had but little to give. I finally secured the privilege of using an old abandoned Negro church and one out-buildingneither of which was really a shelter from

than fifty buildings-many of them three and four story brick structures-and all but the first three built almost wholly by the students themselves as a part of their industrial education. The school possesses 2,700 acres of land-800 acres of which are cultivated by the young men students each year as a part of their training-several hundred head of live stock, machinery, wagons and tools, and property altogether valued at $400,000, on all of which there is no mortgage or claim whatsoever. In addition to this the institution has an endowment fund of $300,000, and twenty-five thousand acres of mineral land given it by the Federal government, the proceeds of which when sold will be added to the endowment fund. The thirty students have increased to fourteen hundred each year, and there are in the neighborhood of one hundred teachers and instructors, all colored men or women, since there is no one connected with the institution except some of the members of the Board of Trustees and one or two persons not resident at the school who is not of the race which the institution is designed to ed

ucate.

HUNTINGTON HALL, A GIRLS DORMITORY,

I had not taught this school many weeks when I became convinced that it would be impossible for me to obtain the results I wished unless I could be able to exert a closer and more constant influence on the lives of the pupils than was possible when I came in contact with them merely during the hours of the school day. The pupils. almost without exception, came from oneroom cabin homes in which they could have had no training in habits of personal cleanliness or in right living. They needed to be taught the use and advantages of the bath, the tooth brush, the night shirt, as much as they needed to be taught morality, religion and how to read and write and cipher.

In addition to this, almost all of the stu dents were so poor that small as were their expenses while attending the school they could not afford to remain long enough to

get much real benefit unless some way

could

as soon as we could afford it, a sewing machine was bought and they began to have more systematic instruction in sewing and dressmaking. Some one gave us a horse to work on the land, and by degrees tools and supplies were given. The people of the town of Tuskegee and the surrounding country, both white and black, showed their interest by their gifts. When we wanted to open up a clay pit on the place and begin to make bricks, a white man at Tuskegee gave us a whole outfit of brickmaking tools. During all the years that the school has been in operation the relations with the white people in the community have been kindly and helpful.

be provided by which they could pay a part or all of their expenses while they were there. Most of them, too, needed to be taught to work, about as much as they needed to be taught books. Many of them had come from small, rented plantations which had been cultivated in a slip-shod way. They knew little of the modern ways of work as I had learned them at Hampton. What they needed, in fact, using the word in its broadest sense, was to learn how to live.

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While I was studying over the future of the school more and more anxiously every day, a plantation of one hundred acres, situated about one mile out of the town, was offered for sale for $500. I found that could buy this piece of land by paying only a small part of the money down, and I resolved at once to found a Hampton in Alabama. A friend loaned me the money necessary to make the first payment. I bought the place and moved the school on to it.

The plantation house on the place had been destroyed by fire, leaving only three small buildings and a henhouse. The school began its work in these three little old outbuildings, but new scholars came so rapidly that I was soon obliged to have the henhouse cleaned out and utilized as a class room. The removal of the school into these quarters, cramped and inconvenient as they were, made many improvements possible. A considerable number of the students could now live at the school, and I could have them with me all of the time. I taught the young men in the class room a portion of the day, and then took them out of doors to work with me on the land. We cleared up the fields and planted crops. The young women did the housework, the cooking and the laundry work. They had training in sewing and mending, and later,

The school kept out-growing its accommodations. We built-largely by our own labor-a three-story wooden building which we named Porter Hall. The basement of this building, damp and dark as it was, we used as a dining room. There was one large room which we used as a chapel and general assembly room; the rest of the building furnished class rooms and sleeping rooms.. Gradually the most of these rooms have been outgrown and replaced with better ones. Our dining room-attached to Alabama Hall-affords room for practically all of the students to sit down at one time. The chapel, outgrown again and again, is

now

a beautiful and commodious brick structure capable of seating 2,400 persons. Some of the executive offices still remain in Porter Hall, although much cramped, but during the past year the money has been given by a friend of the school to build a large and convenient Administration Building, and the students are already at work upon it. Very recently, too, Mrs. C. P. Huntington has signified her wish to give the money to erect an Academic Building at Tuskegee in memory of her husband, the late C. P. Huntington, the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, to be known as the C. P. Huntington Memorial Building. Mr. Huntington was one of the best friends the school has had. Besides innumerable smaller gifts of money and machinery, he gave $50,000 to the endowment fund not long before his death, and Mrs. Huntington gave the money to build Huntington Hall, our finest dormitory for girls. The sum

work at some trade or industry six days in every month. We have innumerable students, men and women both, who come here with hardly a cent over what it has taken them to pay their traveling expenses here, and who stay five or more years working their way all of the time and with no money except what they can earn during vacations. Some do not have even money enough to pay their traveling expenses. Many students walk long distances to get here. Two boys walked from their home in North Carolina, five hundred and fifty

e to be avoided. They ing an education

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the early teachers as well as preachers were called" for similar rea

Conditions in this respect, though. Fantilly growing better in the South. the days of slavery there was an rel man who wanted to learn to play the guitar, and who went to a young