Bereas First Century 1855 1955

Berea's First Century

1855-1955

BEBEA COLLEGE is known today for its unique
educational program for southern mountain
youth, and this book by Elisabeth S. Peek dem-
onstrates that the century-old institution has
always been marked by daring and unorthodox
approaches to learning.

With the spirit that characterizes the College,
Berea's founders chose a site on the edge of the
Bluegrass, a stronghold of slavery in Kentucky,
on which to open in 1855 a one-room school
where they taught emancipation of the Negro.
After the Civil War, interest was shifted to the
freedman, and Berea College became hiracial.

Within sight of the Cumbeiiands, Berea Col-
lege has always been aware of the educational
need of the mountain people, and when legisla-
tion in 1904 excluded Negroes from its classes,
the institution gave its attention to the southern
Appalachian region. Today about 90 per cent of
the student body comes from 230 mountain coun-
ties hi Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama,
the Virginias, and the Garolinas.

For its mountain students Berea College has
had to modify traditional curricula and initiate
new programs, because the Berea student is fre-
quently poorly prepared for college work and
Jie always needs money. College officials comb
the hill country for gifted youth who have had
little schooling, and these young people may en-
roll at any level, for Berea's Foundation School
oilers elementary and secondary preparation.

To the thousands of visitors to the campus, the
most distinctive feature of Berea College is its
Student Industries. As weavers, hospital aides,
waitresses, poultrymen, library assistants, wood-
workers, and laboratory technicians, students are
earning their expenses. Moreover, these Student
Industries aro an integral part of Berea's educa-
tional program: students work at least ten hours
a week at tasks related as closely as possible to
their courses of study.

KANSAS CITY, MO PUBLIC LIBRARY

378.7 B*i-8p 66-04252

Peck

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*ln the dark night they felt their way
through the pathless forest; but when
they saw the dawning, their hearts took
hope from the growing light shed on
their narrow way."

E. S. HOLDERMAN

1855-1955

ELISABETH S. PECK

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PRESS
LEXINGTON

COPYEIGHT 1955 by the University of Kentucky Press.
Printed at the University of Kentucky. Library of Congress
catalog card number: 55-10382.

TO ALL WHO have shared in Berea's first century.

PREFACE

BEREA'S FAY FOREST may well stand as a symbol of the
College, for out in the hills regardless of winter's cold hand on
oaks and anemones alike the forest continues to live because
of its underground roots in the soil. In the Berea story, build-
ings, equipment, courses of study, labor adjuncts, and even in-
struction itself depend for their value upon the underlying
intellectual and spiritual roots.

The Berea story is the narrative of a college that for a cen-
tury has striven to meet social and individual needs. After the
Civil War the newly emancipated Negroes needed teachers,
and Berea trained them. When the mountain people needed
fundamental skills, the College reshaped its organization to
meet this need. When trained specialists were needed in agri-
culture, Berea prepared to give them the best possible training.
Because mountain problems are largely those of a rural society,
Berea has invited its students to add to their preparation the
study of rural sociology, recreation, and health. To fortify its
graduates with nourishment for future living, Berea for a cen-
tury has encouraged participation in humane studies so that
their lives might not become culturally undernourished.

This book has been written to call attention at this centen-
nial date to the imperishable elements underlying the educa-
tional forest called Berea College. The reader may find more
enjoyment in the book if he understands its plan beforehand.
The first two chapters study the founders during the five years

viii Preface

preceding the Civil War and the twenty-five years after the
war, thus forming an introduction to the Berea story. Each of
the six remaining chapters takes some one concern of the Col-
lege and traces it through the century. The six subjects studied
in this way are: (a) Berea's experience in interracial educa-
tion; (b) growth of the idea of a geographical area the south-
ern Appalachian mountainsas a field of special interest; (c)
a century's development in an adapted educational program;
(d) growth of Berea's work program for education as well as
for self-support; (e) Berea's experience in financing this private
Christian college; and (f ) long-continued sharing of its oppor-
tunities through extension service. By the time the reader has
traversed the century in these six different ways, he cannot
fail to recognize the underground roots that supply Berea's
vital strength.

Berea has had great presidents, well-trained and devoted
teachers, and invaluable trustees and donors. These have be-
come greater, more deeply devoted, and more valuable through
the intellectual ideas and the spiritual strength characteristic
of Berea College in its first century.

So many people have helped in the making of this book
that to enumerate them would weary the reader, but to select
a few for special appreciation would be ungracious to the
others. To an unusual degree this book is our book rather than
my book.

ELISABETH S. PECK

CONTENTS

PREFACE page vii

THE BEREA STORY, by Henry F. Pringle xiii

CHAPTER 1: Early Founders 1

CHAPTER 2: Founders during Reconstruction 26

CHAPTER 3: A Century of Interrace Education 39

CHAPTER 4: The Mountain Field 63

CHAPTER 5: Changing Patterns of Education 82

CHAPTER 6: Labor for Education 110

CHAPTER 7: Financing a Private College 140

CHAPTER 8: A Century of Sharing 163

A SURVEY OF SOURCES 191

REFERENCES 205

INDEX 211

ILLUSTRATIONS

JOHN G. FEE

BEBEA COLLEGE DURING THE FAIRCHILD ADMiNiSTRA-noisr

between pages 28 and 29

BEREA STUDENTS IN THE 1890's
GOTHIC CHAPEL

between pages 44 and 45

STUDENT LABOR IN THE EARLY 1900's
BEREA STUDENTS AT WORK

between pages 92 and 93

CHIMES PLAYING Is LABOR, Too

BEREA STUDENTS WEAVING AT FIRESIDE INDUSTRIES

between pages 108 and 109

PHELPS STOKES CHAPEL

COOKING CLASSES IN THE 1890 ? s AND TODAY

between pages 156 and 157

BEREA'S EXTENSION WORK
SOUTHERN APPALACHIA

between pages 172 and 173

THE BEREA STORY

A REMARKABLE number of things concerning Berea Col-
lege are unique, as the reader of this book will soon discover.
The history of Berea, stretching back for a century, is as un-
usual as its living present. It is filled with vivid light and black
shadow. But the violence of the past which Mrs. Peck describes
in her early chapters is now, happily, only vanished thunder
against the peace and tranquillity of today. The story of Berea
is that of a handful of determined men who knew success at
last, after grief and frustration and disappointment.

Such raw materials of a hundred years are the responsibility
of Berea's historian, who has fashioned them well into the pat-
tern which makes the whole. Yet some of us who have spent a
little time, always too little, at this institution in the Kentucky
hills incline to look at the immediate years rather than back at
the yesterdays. We experienced, when we left the campus and
the town, an eager yearning to return to the school of which
we were not alumni. And those among us who can do so will,
in truth, go back again. For the spirit and quality of Berea pull
both hearts and minds. Sample them once and they are well-
nigh irresistible.

Why is this so? Perhaps it is because a good many of us
are, whether admittedly or not, pragmatists at heart. We hold
that the only test of doing, if a somewhat loose definition of
pragmatism is allowable, is the successful journey to the end-
to that greatly desired 'consummation without too much bother.

xiv The Berea Story

fuss and feathers. Berea meets the test. This, quite alone, is
pleasantly reassuring in a confused and disrupted world where
Goal A is often obscured by Goal B and sometimes turns out to
have been Goal Q all along. Comforting facts about Berea re-
main constant and change very little with the decades. Among
those facts are an education offered at the lowest possible cost;
a balanced budget and the economy which make this unusual
fact possible; hard work and a devotion to a broadly practical,
nondenominational Christianity.

Berea's business is the education of young men and women.
Thus it is well to be specific rather than cosmically general.
The measure of any college apart from faculty, buildings, libra-
ries, and the administrative officers is the young people who
throng the grounds. In a day when we worry, probably too
much, about the oncoming generation Berea is again a relaxing
comfort. It might be assumed that the Bereans are intelligent
and good-mannered. There is more than that, however. The
pretty girls do not slouch from class to class wearing blue jeans
with their shirttails hanging out. The boys appear to shave as
often as may be necessary and also look well scrubbed, in con-
trast to the undergraduates of larger and more elegant institu-
tions which we are far too discreet to name.

Berea is of and servesas it always has and doubtless always
will the mountain youth of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Ala-
bama, the Carolinas, and the Virginias. Nearly all of the stu-
dents come from within the boundaries of that remote and
lovely region sometimes called Appalachia. A majority are
usually Kentuckians and some have set forth from places within
the state with such unlikely names as Hot Spot, Upper Shut-in,
and Kingdom Come. And not a few of them go back after
Commencement Day to their natal communities up the winding
creeks, bone-dry in the summers and roaring freshets in the
spring, to teach or do other greatly needed work among their
people.

At times, Berea has been mistakenly thought to be merely a
better than average preparatory school, a kind of backwoods

The Berea Story xv

mission where only the rudiments are taught. It is true that
remedial courses are still given to two or three hundred boys
and girls, with not infrequently an adult enrolled too. But the
great majority of the students are doing collegiate work of the
first rank. Until the 1920's, though, most of the mountain off-
spring had inadequate preparation, due to the sparse and re-
mote public schools. Well remembered is the boy who turned
up in 1911 without even a knowledge of his letters.

"But IVe learned to ride and shoot and shoe horses," he said,
"and I allow I can get book learnin* too."

He did. He raced through five grades within half a year.
Ultimately he entered the College Department.

The College is proud of such students, just as it takes pride
in the mountain handcraf ts with which many of them are famil-
iar. The fact that everybody at Berea works is too well known
to need elaboration here. Some design and produce the textiles
on the looms. Others fashion cherry and mahogany chairs and
tables, while still others perform such relatively mundane
chores as tasks in the College-owned power plant, bakery, and
dairy. Berea looks back with satisfaction on the traditions of
Appalachia, but it never gets quaint about them. Students from
up the creeks may say "hit" for it or "holp" for help when they
first arrive. But swift and intensive instruction in speech and
grammar soon works a remedy. The boys and girls at Berea
talk precisely like their fellows everywhere else except, perhaps,
for the warmth of soft southern accents.

In these days of uncertainty and argument, following the Su-
preme Court decision calling for integration of schools through-
out the land, it is pertinent to note that Berea admitted Negroes
from the start. "On the Berea campus," Mrs. Peck has written
of the period prior to the turn of the century, "there was no
activity in which both Negroes and whites did not share." They
recited in the same rooms, worshiped their God in the same
chapel, played sports or debated together, and "sang in the
same choral society." Negroes were nearly always officers in
the clubs and other organizations of the students. And no riots

xvl The Berea Story

took place. We respectfully refer this historical truth to the
attorneys general of Virginia and other southern states should
they propose to file additional alarmist briefs with the Supreme
Court of the United States.

For a period half, or even more, of the students were
Negroes and, as Berea's historian goes on to explain, hundreds
of them were guided "into the fellowship of an educated Negro-
white society, and hundreds of young white students into an
understanding of the Negroes' problems and the Negroes'
worth/' But race prejudice and hatred were soon swiftly on
the march, for reasons our social historians have not yet fully
explained. In 1904 Kentucky adopted a law which forbade the
joint education of the two races. Berea's trustees promptly
raised $400,000 with which to establish Lincoln Institute, near
Louisville. But no longer did the blacks and whites learn to
know and thus respect one another on the Berea campus.

Not as many Negroes had ever lived in Kentucky as in, for
instance, Alabama or Mississippi., and fewer still in the hill
country which Berea covered. Even these began to migrate
toward better jobs and more decent surroundings, and their
migration was greatly stimulated by World War I and World
War II. When, in 1950, the statutory ban against educational
integration was lifted, there were relatively few Negroes left
In the mountain counties and fewer still who could qualify for
Berea's rising scholastic standards. Yet three of them matricu-
lated that first year, with a gradually Increasing number In the
years that followed.

Pleasant details linger In the minds of the fortunate people
who pay a call on Berea. One of them is related, If a degree
indirectly, to this chapter in the slow progress of tolerance. On
the campus In 1953 was the son of a Nigerian chieftain, whose
face still bore the marks of tribal tattooing. He was taking a
premedical course, turning his back on both family wealth and
political position, In order to return to Nigeria and help heal
the bodily ills of his countrymen. Strict conformists might
argue that he was a member of the foreign contingent, which

The Berea Story xvii

usually includes a handful of Chinese and Koreans, rather than
a Negro. This seems splitting a racial hair. He was an attrac-
tive lad, with a charming smile, who whizzed around the quad-
rangle on his bicycle and was a reporter on the college weekly
newspaper.

Berea could never tolerate prejudice, of course, for it is
surely listed among the deadly sins. Nor did it, from the very
start. The beginning in 1855 was truly crude; this was little
more than a one-room school. Berea actually evolved from a
nonsectarian church which had been started two years earlier
by John G. Fee, a minister whose father had owned slaves but
who loathed slavery. The new school, hoped Mr. Fee, would
be "anti-caste, anti-rum, anti-sin," and so, with remarkable and
yet typical consistency, is the Berea of 1955. Students may
smoke in specified parts of the dormitories. The "anti-rum"
code applies to teachers and students alike. Yet there is no anti-
joy clause anywhere in the basic law. The boys and girls
indulge in an endless round of activities sports, theatricals,
choral singing, folk dances, and picnics; bull sessions in the
dormitory rooms after night has set in and everybody is sup-
posed to be buried in books. The visitor who concludes that
the antirum, antinicotine regulations have, as their purpose, the
money saved will have reached a sound conclusion.

The Bereans are serious-minded young people, for all the
fun they have. They attend a full-fledged college. The cur-
riculum is rich and varied. It has been worked out to enrich
four years with more than a glimpse of the world's culture
before the undergraduates go on to such specialties as music,
art, agriculture, science, economics or teaching, on which their
livelihoods may depend. An upperclassman will normally have
time for subjects which have no direct relation to his profes-
sion. He may elect the Greek classics in translation, spring
flora, ancient history, or poetry. But he is well advised not to
scatter his energies too widely. Each year a regretful few,
unable to make the required grades, pack their bags and sadly
return home.

xviii The Berea Story

Meanwhile the students earn their way, or by far the greater
part of it. Berea's first Constitution and by-laws of July, 1859,
stated that work would be furnished the students so that they
might obtain an education. In 1892 William Goodell Frost of
Obeiiin, where a comparable experiment had been tried, was
invited to become president of Berea. He accepted. He grew
to know well and to love the men and women of the mountains.
Often he would ride horseback into the back country, to visit
the families and to find new prospects. His roads were the beds
of the streams, and he cherished the memory of his early jour-
neys when the trails were unfamiliar to him. He enjoyed, in
particular, one day when he asked his way of a mountaineer.

"Why, Mr. President, it's tolerably easy," was the slow
answer. "You just go up the middle fork of the Kentucky River,
and you take the second creek to the right, then the fourth
branch to the left, and on to the headwaters and over the divide
until you come to the headwaters of another creek."

President Frost, it may be assumed, found his way, just as
he guided Berea on its own true, straight path. He had not
been running the College very long before, remembering the
pledge in the Constitution that labor would be provided for
the students, he began to expand the college industries. Presi-
dent Frost was a Greek scholar, but he was also a businessman
of unusual acumen. He made certain that the farm, the print
shop, and the other early sources of employment operated in
the black, not with deficits.

For in student earnings he saw an extraordinary form of
college financing.

"If students could only rely upon ten cents an hour after a
term's apprenticeship," he wrote, "it would be equal to more
than a $100,000 endowment."

They earned the hourly ten cents, but meanwhile the more
traditional capital fund of Berea grew. This is surely the only
educational institution in the country which inherited a legacy
worth some $50,000 because of the quality of the beaten biscuits
sold by the college bakery. The tale is no college legend, but

The Berea Story xix

the exact truth. Not long ago a prosperous farmer purchased a
batch of these southern delectables from the student-driven
bakery truck and was so delighted that he bequeathed his
farm to the College. Other assistance came from many sources.
Berea's endowment is now a comfortable $15,000,000. Let us
hastily add that additional funds are sorely needed. Faculty
salaries are still too low. Additional buildings might expand
Berea's program.

The students pay no tuition. They still work. Their hourly
pay scales have doubled and trebled, although they are still
below Uncle Sam's minimum scales in dollars and cents. But
to the student's total earnings must be added what the law calls
"other facilities," in this case his share in the costly educational
opportunities furnished by the College, which bring the aver-
age student earnings well above the law's minimum wage.
The money wages now range from eighteen to thirty-four cents
an hour, and this brings up a fascinating field of speculation.
If President Frost estimated that students, laboring at ten cents
an hour, created an endowment of $100,000, the total is surely
far more than that today.

We leave the exact, astronomical figure to the expert mathe-
maticians at Berea College.

HENRY F. PRINGLE

CHAPTER

1: Early
Founders

BEREA COLLEGE is located on a narrow ridge that seems
to rise like a rocky island seventy feet above the surrounding
plain. This ridge, which is about two miles long, lies in eastern
Kentucky 130 miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio, and 40 miles
southeast of Lexington. The foothills of the Cumberland Pla-
teau are not more than three miles distant on the east and
south. They are sometimes hazy blue in the distance, some-
times lost in low-hanging clouds; and sometimes after a snow-
fall they are covered with a muster of tree trunks that stand
black and stark against the white slope. West and northwest
of the Berea Ridge there is not a hill in sight, only Bluegrass
farmland for unending miles. At the foot of the Ridge on the
north lies an uncommonly flat stretch of land called the Glade.
Cassius M. Clay, an influential landowner who lived in the
Bluegrass section of Madison County, Kentucky, owned six
hundred acres of land in the southern end of the county on
and around the Ridge. In the early 1850's he sold off much
of this land at an exceptionally low price because he wished to
develop there a thriving community that would demonstrate
the advantages of life without slavery and might even increase
his political strength in the state.

2 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

He encouraged a young rural pastor, the Reverend John G.
Fee, to move from northern Kentucky to southern Madison
County and gave him a homestead of ten acres on the Ridge;
for Fee, like Clay, was a strong antislavery man and an ardent
believer in the value of freedom of speech as a means of solving
social problems. In 1855 Fee and some neighbors built a one-
room district school on the Ridge. In 1858 when John A. R.
Rogers came to Berea, as the community on the Ridge had
been named by Fee, to join him in his country preaching, Fee
advised Rogers to set up a subscription term in the one-room
school, for Rogers was an experienced teacher as well as a
minister.

Already Clay and Fee had recognized the need for a "higher
school" in this nonslaveholding community, and Rogers also
brought with him the desire for such a school. In the summer
of 1859, after seeing the popularity of "the good Rogers school,"
Fee, Rogers, and a few other men wrote the constitution for a
college and arranged to buy a boundary of Ridge land that
seemed suitable for a college campus. After the John Brown
raid in Virginia in the fall of that year, fear sprang up in the
slaveholding section of Madison County that the men of Berea
might be preparing for a similar uprising. This led to the
forced exile of the Berea leaders and their families in mid-
winter, 1859-1860, when Clay for political reasons did not rally
his friends to their support.

By the close of the Civil War, Fee had raised almost enough
money among northern friends to pay for the Ridge land on
which the college trustees held an option, and with the return
of peace the exiles came back to their Berea work. Although
this young college lacked buildings, endowment, and money
for current expenses, it had no shortage of students, a consider-
able number of whom were newly emancipated Negroes. For
whom was Berea College founded? For those who needed its
service. The 1859 Constitution said nothing about a stttdenfs
race or place of residence.

Early Founders

ii

JOHN G. FEE was still a young man when he settled in Berea,
having been born in 1816. He had been reared in Bracken
County on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. His father
found it profitable to cultivate his farm with slave labor, but he
was not a cruel master, as masters went, and he was not a great
planter, for he usually fanned with about thirteen slaves. Young
Fee took his diploma in the classical course at Augusta College
in his home county, and entered Lane Seminary on the out-
skirts of Cincinnati in 1842, finishing his course there two years
later. He had thought nothing about the sinfulness of slavery
until he entered the seminary, where zealous students pleaded
with him to take a strong stand for human freedom. At last he
cried out in his solitary place of daily prayer: "Lord, if needs
be, make me an abolitionist." Then and there he entered into
a covenant with God that shaped the rest of his life. 1

After returning home, he tried to persuade his father, an
elder in the Presbyterian Church, to give up slaveholding, but
his father replied by offering to send him to Princeton Seminary,
New Jersey, to be taught sounder ideas. Young Fee refused
his father's offer, and in the following year he was ordained by
the Harmony Presbytery of Kentucky, and was then commis-
sioned by the American Home Missionary Society to work
with country churches along the Ohio River. When he made
it plain from the pulpit that he was opposed to slavery, he met
threats of violence and his audience diminished in number.
Some people said that he was a dangerous man to have in the
region, for Kentuckians along the river were unusually sensitive
on the matter of speaking against slavery, lest slaves try to
escape across the Ohio River to freedom. In 1848 he took a
letter of dismissal from the Synod because he would not cease
his preaching against slavery, and withdrew from the American
Home Missionary Society because its funds were used to sup-
port proslavery ministers.

4 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Because a full account of his disagreement with his Synod
was published in the New York Evangelist, Fee was immedi-
ately offered a commission by the newly organized American
Missionary Association (A.M. A.), which took a positive stand
against slaveholding. Soon he was tending nine small rural
churches in Ohio River counties. Sometimes rough men mob-
bed him, angry men cursed Mm, and hired men waylaid him;
but by the time he had ministered to these churches for five
years, men out of respect for him as a man of God seldom
annoyed him.

Cassius M. Clay saw in this fearless rural pastor a fit man
for the service which he projected, namely, to build up a free
community having political strength in the mountainous part
of the state "where there were but few slaves and the people
courageous." 2 Clay had published Fee's articles in his True
American in 1845-1846; and had been so much interested in
Fee's book, An Antislauery Manual, published in 1848 and re-
vised in 1851, that he had ordered a boxful of these books to be
distributed in Madison County, where he had much land and
great influence. He found also in Fee's words his own emphasis
upon freedom of thought and liberty of expression as natural
and constitutional rights. 3

Through Clay's influence Fee was invited to hold some re-
ligious meetings in the Glade north of the Berea Ridge. At the
close of these meetings thirteen people associated themselves
together to form a new church that would be nondenomina-
tional and free. The following year, 1854, this little group of
people asked Fee to move from the Ohio River region and
become their pastor. Clay strengthened their appeal by offering
Fee a ten-acre homestead, $200 to help in building a home,
and a site in the Glade for a school and a church. The A.M.A.
consented to this change of field, and in the fall of 1854 when
the new house was ready for Mrs. Fee and their three small
children, Fee moved them from Lewis County on the Ohio
River to Madison County in the interior. As there was no rail-
road to Berea in those days, he packed the family's household

Early Founders 5

goods in a two-horse wagon, seated his family in a one-horse
carriage, and set out for Berea, where he arrived at the close
of the third day. "Believing as we did that we were exactly
where the Lord would have us, we lay down and slept calmly,
sweetly.' 74

in

CASSIUS M. CLAY, who in later years found great satisfaction
in the part which he played in the Berea story, was only six
years older than John G. Fee. When Clay was a student at
Yale, he, like Fee at Lane, had wrestled hard with his own soul.
A fellow student had taken the sensitive young Clay, a slave-
holder in his own right, to hear William Lloyd Garrison, who
violently flayed the evils and the unreasonableness of slavery.
From that day Clay was opposed to human slavery.

The two men differed in certain ways. Fee was a country
minister, though no ordinary one; Clay was a landed country
gentleman whose greatest interest was politics with special
emphasis upon freedom of speech. When Fee spoke in public,
lie appealed to men's conscience by words which Clay said
were full of tender passion, by his rather sad expression, and by
his style, "concise, terse, and earnest." 5 Clay used the im-
petuous style of address common to southern orators of his
day, characterized by strong words, fiery charges, and black
denunciations. Fee always went unarmed, but Clay was likely
to have a bowie knife stuck in his belt and at least one pistol
close at hand. The two men differed also in their arguments
against slavery. Fee based his antislavery talks on the idea
that slavery is a sin against human brotherhood. Clay empha-
sized the evils arising from slavery: depression of education,
manufactures, agriculture, the fine arts, and constitutional
liberties, as well as the encouragement pressed upon white
nonslaveholding people to emigrate from Kentucky because of
the low condition of their economic life and their schools. 6
When Clay sold land near the Ridge to such a liberal as Hamil-

6 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

ton Rawlings, when lie gave a homestead to Fee, and when he
let it be known that he was Fee's defender, he was laying the
foundations for his democratic free community in the hill coun-
try.

In spite of their differences Fee recognized the importance
of Clay to his pastoral work in the hills. There he was doing
the same kind of work as he had done previously in the north-
ern counties of the state, directing missionary colporters and
calling on lonely families, giving both tracts and kindly words
to people who had no church near at hand, as well as preaching
in newly founded churches that met in homes or schoolhouses.
People even in remote places in southern Madison County had
known of Cassius M. Clay before ever they heard of John G.
Fee, and they were inclined to regard Clay as the young
preacher's protector. In his first year of residence in Berea, Fee
wrote to the A.M.A. in New York that Clay had been the chief
means by which this field had been opened to him. 7

IV

A ONE-ROOM SCHOOL was built in 1855 on a lot contributed by
a local man, William B. Wright. This lot was located on the
Berea Ridge near the Fee homestead, not on the low Glade lot
which Clay had given to the new community for a school. The
teacher of this school in its first two terms was William E.
Lincoln, an Oberlin student paid by the A.M.A. to use his long
vacations in helping Fee with his mountain work. In later remi-
niscences Lincoln wrote: "Brother Fee came to me one day . . .
and said, 'Mr. Burnam . . . has offered to build us a preaching
place and a schoolhouse, if you will teach for six months with-
out pay/ I eagerly agreed, for it was also promised that all we
preached should be allowed." 8 Some men, even Fee himself,
furnished labor, and so the community on and around the
Ridge soon had a schoolhouse, where the followers of Fee could
also hold their church service. This one-room slab school was

Early Founders 7

the beginning of Berea College. It is nothing to be ashamed
of now at the close of a century, since in spite of its cracks and
its board benches it met an urgent social need. It had begun
with the best of all aims for a college.

In this year, 1855, Fee planned a Fourth of July celebration
with Cassius M. Clay as the chief speaker. A large audience of
orderly citizens gathered, and Clay held the audience for two
hours. He showed that slavery, which had been retarding pros-
perity, was now taking away liberty of speech. Fee followed
with further words on slavery and freedom of expression, and
the audience was favorably impressed. On this occasion Fee
was speaking in the shadow of the great Cassius M. Clay.

On the following Fourth of July, 1856, a rally was held at
Slate Lick Springs, a few miles from the Berea Ridge. The
fact that this was a presidential election year turned the gather-
ing from a picnic into a serious argument over political plat-
forms. To Fee, Cassius M. Clay seemed to be following the line
of expediency for the sake of helping his party to win the fall
election. Men went home in confusion of mind. Many a man
said: "Fee is religiously right; Clay is politically right." 9 After
this 1856 rally men thought that Clay had withdrawn his sup-
port from Fee and his young preachers. For many months after
this picnic Clay did not call at Fee's house as he had been ac-
customed to do, and some men began to be afraid to be counted
as Fee's friends.

In 1857 and 1858 the mob spirit raged in Madison and ad-
joining counties, and several times endangered Fee's life; but
he continued his preaching and his pastoral calls. When the
grand jury made no presentment for an unusually serious at-
tack upon him in nearby Rockcastle County, lawless men
threatened him repeatedly, in order to force him to leave their
county, but without avail. A friend of Fee's in 1857 urged Clay
to speak some words that would calm men who took too literally
Clay's words "revolutionary" and "insurrectionary" as applied
to Fee; but within a week Clay replied: "While I denounce all
mobs, I can give him neither aid nor comfort." 10 One is bound

8 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

to ask how John G. Fee could pass through these trying experi-
ences with so much quiet courage. He himself wrote the an-
swer: "I had anticipated something of this when, fifteen years
previously, I had entered into covenant with God to preach in
my native State the gospel of love, of justice, and of liberty. I
had counted the cost, and did not then, nor in the hands of any
mob, have to decide what to do." 11 John G. Fee's repeated
demonstration of courage in defense of his principles is a
precious part of Berea's intangible endowment.

The one-room school that contained the germ of Berea Col-
lege continued its sessions in spite of terrors. In two letters
written by Fee concerning the school of Otis B. Waters, an
Oberlin student who succeeded Lincoln in the winter of 1857-
1858, these points are of special interest: Fee mentioned that
six young men from outside the district had enrolled, to receive
some preparation for becoming teachers; and several slave-
holders had sent their children to this school taught by an anti-
slavery man. 12

BEFOKE BEKEA'S one-room school became a genuine college, at
least three men had conceived of a college in the Berea region.
Clay had suggested to Fee that he "take land for a school, to
be enlarged to a college hereafter/' 13 Already on November 9,
1855, the year in which the Berea school opened, Fee had
written to the American Missionary about the need for a higher
school "which would be to Kentucky what Oberlin is to Ohio,
antislavery, anti-caste, anti-rum, anti-sin. . . . Why can we not
have such a school here?" 14 Two months later he wrote to Ger-
rit Smith in New York: "We have for months been talking
about starting an academy, and eventually look to a college-
giving an education to all colors, classes, cheap and thorough." 15
In 1858 the Reverend John A. R. Rogers came to the Ridge,
aflame with the idea of establishing a college in eastern Ken-
tucky.

Early Founders 9

Rogers was twelve years younger than Fee, had graduated
from Oberlin College and Seminary, had taught in New York,
and for a year had served as a pastor in Illinois. His sister was
the wife of James S. Davis, Fee's successor as rural pastor in
the northern Kentucky work. Many years later Rogers wrote:
"I did not know Mr. Fee and had never written him a line or
consulted with him in any way. I had become deeply interested
in eastern Kentucky and in helping to start a college there. . . .
This work was so on my spirit that when a friend went to Ken-
tucky and then turned back, I told my wife that if she would
give her consent, we would go ourselves." 16

This young minister, his eighteen-year-old wife, and their
baby spent the winter of 1857-1858 at Cabin Creek in northern
Kentucky with the Davis family, and Rogers at this time
secured a commission from the A.M. A. to be, like Davis and
Fee, a rural minister of the Association. Alone he walked more
than a hundred miles to Berea and talked long with Fee, who
had recently been mobbed near the Kentucky River. Fee was
vague about where Rogers might work, and Rogers returned
to his family rather discouraged at the prospects; but before
many weeks he received a letter from Fee saying that he
wanted Rogers to work at Berea.

If Fee had had only a college in his mind, he probably
would not have hesitated in his talks with Rogers, for already
he saw that the young man was the very person he needed for
taking the next step with his school. Fee, however, like Clay,
had in his mind the idea of setting up a kind of colony, an in-
dustrious, nonslaveholding community, as a protest against the
sluggishness of a slaveholding society. 17 Because of the poor
soil in the Berea region he was uncertain as to whether a colony
could prosper there. William E. Lincoln wrote: "I went with
Brother Fee to examine sites on which a school, to grow,
should be founded; and one place in Rockcastle where a man
offered land and where there was a waterfall was seriously con-
sidered by Brother Fee and myself. . . . The land was level
and rich, underlaid by limestone, and not slate, as in Berea/' 18

10 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

But there were lawless men in that county who had burned
down the church-schoolhouse where Waters had taught and
preached one vacation, and had threatened the Reverend
George Candee, and even Fee himself. In Fee's mind there was
a controversy between water and limestone on the one hand
and such good men as Hamilton Rawlings, John Burnam,
Squire William Stapp, and Thomas Jefferson Renfro on the
other hand; and in time the good men won in his mind over
water and soil.

After receiving Fee's letter of welcome, Rogers and his little
family traveled from Cabin Creek to Berea by steamboat, train,
stagecoach, and livery carriage. The driver took them to Fee's
house: "What an oasis it was in the wilderness," Mrs. Rogers
wrote, "and what sweet music was the sound of Mr. Fee's voice
welcoming us! ... We found Mr. Fee most cheery. His Scotch
Irish ancestry was always most evident. Sandy complexioned,
kindly in heart, it were as well to try to move the mountains
about Berea, as Mr. Fee when he felt he was in the right/' 19
As there was no vacant house for the Rogers family to rent,
they lodged with a local family for some time.

On the Monday morning following their arrival J. A. R.
Rogers and his wife began teaching an extra term of school, a
"pay school," though no one was turned away who could not
pay. They taught in the same one-room schoolhouse where
Waters had taught the regular winter term before returning
to his seminary work in Oberlin. The school started with fifteen
children, three of these being little Fees. Mrs. Rogers left her
baby at the Wrights 7 home across from the school, and did most
of the teaching at first, while her husband called widely in the
neighborhood. Soon fifty names were on the roll, and Profes-
sor Rogers taught the older pupils while his wife cared for the
younger pupils. By the end of the term in June almost a hun-
dred pupils, including slaveholders' children, were enrolled.

The schoolhouse was poorly built and shabby, but the
school had some features that made it attractive. It was a
happy school with much singing. Later Mrs. Rogers wrote:

Early Founders 11

"I think our little songbook, The Oriole, was splendidly adapted
to our needs. Those songs set the countryside afire. They were
something new and different from anything they had ever
known, and they sang them ... on the hillsides and in the
valleys. They entered every home." 20 To add to the school's
enjoyment Professor Rogers and the boys cleared a playground
in the adjoining woods, and there both boys and girls enjoyed
many sports and games. To relieve the long day, five-minute
rests were frequently called. But this was more than a happy
school. Professor Rogers was a well-educated man who brought
new ideas into the crowded room when he taught geography
with plenty of astronomy in it and performed experiments in
chemistry and physics before their eyes. Every Friday after-
noon the school gave an entertainment, which parents were
invited to attend.

At the end of the term in June, 1858, the school gave a
closing exhibition in an improvised arbor under the tall oaks.
A large platform had been built to seat all the pupils. On the
program there were recitations, dialogs, orations, and choruses.
When the young valedictorian reviewed the term and gave his
words of farewell, the audience was brought to the brink of
tears. This was Berea's first Commencement. After a basket
dinner on the grounds and encouraging words from out-of-
town speakers, including the county judge, a subscription was
easily raised to add another room to the schoolhouse. The kind-
liness of Mrs. Rogers, the resourceful scholarship of her hus-
band, and the pupils' joy in music and in play have remained a
part of the Berea tradition for a century. Of course, no college
association in the entire country, had there been such in 1858,
would have recognized this live, progressive school as a college,
except in its hope for the future. '

When the second term opened in September, this school
had all the students that the building could hold even with its
additional rooms divided into sections by partitions of sheeting.
There was a new teacher added to the staff, John Gregg Han-
son from Bracken County, a cousin of Fee's, an interesting in-

12 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

ventor, expert in surveying, and with plans to set up a sawmill
and a planing mill. A program of the exhibition at the close of
the second term, December 1, 1858, still remains, and it shows
that already the school had become something of a "higher
school 5 ' in spite of the elementary children who shared in the
exercises. The program opened with a student's salutatory ad-
dress and closed with a valedictory and a benediction. There
were many recitations, declamations, and essays, but only two
orations, one on the subject of "Modern Society," and the other
on "The Scholar's Mission." Between every four spoken num-
bers there was music by the school, making a total of sixteen
songs. In the middle of the program there was a discussion by
the Dialectic Club on the subject: "Should Caesar be called
Great?" The last number before the valedictory certainly had
the flavor of a higher school. It was a drama: "Catiline: Scene
I, Cicero addresses the Senate against Catiline. Scene II, Ban-
ishment of Catiline and his Reply."

The school ran successfully for two terms in the following
year, though there was some unrest among the parents because
of the antislavery views of the school trustees. When a spirited
school election in the summer returned a candidate of Fee's
preference, the majority's choice was quietly accepted for
trustee.

VI

IN SEPTEMBER, 1858, Fee and Rogers invited a number of men
to meet with them to talk over the matter of setting up a con-
stitution and securing a charter for a college in Berea. These
men met many times during the ensuing year, and completed
their draft on July 14, 1859, The articles of agreement were
proposed in the names of John G. Fee, J. A. R. Rogers, and
John G. Hanson; three substantial farmers of the community:
William Stapp, John Smith, and Thomas Jefferson Renfro; and
three rural ministers: George Candee, Jacob Emerick, and J. S.
Davis.

Early Founders 13

The fundamentals of the first Constitution remain, for the
most part, the essentials of Berea College today. The opening
words remain, "In order to promote the cause of Christ." The
name of the institution was "Berea College." The aim of the
College was clearly stated in the first bylaw: "The purpose of
the College shall be to furnish the facilities for a thorough
education to all persons of good moral character, at the least
possible expense, and all the inducements and facilities for
manual labor which can reasonably be supplied by the Board
of Trustees shall be offered/' The second bylaw shows dis-
tinctly the historical background of the founders: "This Col-
lege shall be under an influence strictly Christian, and as such
opposed to sectarianism, slaveholding, caste, and every other
wrong institution or practice." There was no statement made
in this document as to any specific area or group of people
that this institution was to serve. The expression as to labor
did not provide that the College would set up organized in-
dustries or farm tasks to furnish labor for the students. Al-
though this Constitution empowered the trustees to appoint a
president for the College, they did not do this until the institu-
tion had been several years in operation. Instead, they im-
mediately appointed a Prudential Committee for administra-
tion, and instructed it to buy land for the new College. The
first Prudential Committee included Fee, Rogers, Hanson, and
Renfro. These men arranged for the purchase of a beautiful
wooded boundary of land owned by John G. Woolwine. This
tract of some 110 acres on the Ridge they bought for $1,750
and accrued interest, "for the purpose of erecting the college
buildings upon it, and for a town plot." The College had no
money yet, but these four trustees assumed responsibility for
payment of the debt.

It is hard to realize now that when this Constitution was
drafted, application made for a charter, and arrangements
made for buying the Woolwine land, hardly five years had
passed since the Fees set up housekeeping on the Berea Ridge.
It was providential that the trustees made these definite ar-

14 Berea' s First Century, 1855-1955

rangements for tlie future, to give a certain concreteness to
their hopes. It seems now as though they were battening down
their hatches before the storm should break upon them in the
following December, 1859.

VII

IN THE WINTER of 1858-1859 the young men of the Dialectic
Society had discussed long and earnestly the question of
whether Negroes should be admitted to the school, if any ap-
plied. This question was soon discussed throughout the neigh-
borhood. The view of the teachers and of John G. Fee was that
certainly they should be admitted, if the school was to be truly
"anti-caste/'

There were other causes of unrest, however, besides the
hypothetical question of admitting Negroes. A political cam-
paign was approaching, and Republicans were deep in the dis-
cussion of their party's stand on slavery. Such men as Fee and
his co-workers in Berea were opposed to this "weak" position
and to any candidate who did not take a stand against slavery
altogether.

In spite of noisy unrest and talk of a possible mob coming
to their homes, men like Fee, Rogers, and Hanson would cany
no weapons; but Mrs. Rogers revealed her fear when she laid
beside her bed some sticks and a syringe filled with a stinging
chemical from her husband's school cupboard. Then as though
with a laugh she wrote: "I have a feeling that the mob, if they
had ever come, would have gone away unmolested/' 21

The general unrest was heightened by news of John Brown's
raid at Harpers Ferry in October, 1859. Men in the Bluegrass
end of Madison County where there were many slaves pointed
to the Berea Ridge as a strategic place from which a similar
raid might be launched, which in this case might be successful.
Kentucky newspapers added to the common fear by reporting
falsely that boxes of Sharpe's rifles had been seized on the way

Early Founders 15

to Berea. When men searched the household goods of a man
who was moving to Berea and discovered in one of the boxes
a dangerous-looking machine, the "infernal" thing they found
turned out to be nothing more deadly than a set of candle
molds.

Then on a Sunday evening, November 13, 1859, in an ad-
dress at Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn, John G.
Fee, who had gone East to raise money for the new school,
unintentionally raised the fears of Madison County proslavery
men to a climax. In his appeal for men and money with which
to spread the gospel of impartial love in Kentucky, he said that
there was need for more John Browns not in the manner of
his action but in the spirit of consecration, not with carnal
weapons but with the word of the spirit men who would ap-
peal in love to both slaveholders and nonslaveholders. 22

Soon Kentucky newspapers were flaming with an incom-
plete fragment from Fee's address, "We want more John
Browns," and the report spread that he was in New York raising
money to finance an uprising in the hills back of Berea. Nu-
merous public meetings were held in the Madison County
courthouse, and at length a committee was appointed to remove
the Berea leaders from the state, Fee and Rogers being es-
pecially mentioned by name. 23 Both of these men wrote letters
to Kentucky papers explaining how completely Fee's words
had been misinterpreted; and from Pittsburgh, Fee sent out a
printed circular far and wide to correct the error. But these
efforts failed to quiet the storm that had been raised.

Mrs. Rogers gives a picture of these days of terror:

"Meetings were held at the county seat to consider the best
means of disposing of us. Oh, those days grew darker and
darker. . . . Our closer friends, the planters, had little to say.
While they, with their Richmond neighbors, disliked Berea's
sentiments, they loved us. But they were too greatly cowed
to speak for us if they had wished; . . .

"I think Uncle Ham Rawlings was our true friend, our
traveling newspaper, bringing us news that we could not get

16 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

outside. . . . The coming of our brother, Mr. Davis, escaping
in danger from Cabin Creek, did not add particularly to our
feeling of safety. Still, we hoped to stay. We had had our fall
butchering. I had made lard and put away hams and pork for
winter's use.

"Mrs. Fee, left alone with her little children, rose to the
occasion . . . and I do not know but she with her brave spirit
was my husband's greatest help. Her knowledge of Ken-
tuckians, of former mistreatment no doubt often gave her more
insight into conditions than could have been possible to those
of later date. . . .

"Daily we watched for what was to come, and we grew to
fear the worst. The tension was terrible, and I believe I grew
to wish that the mob would come, do their worst, and have it
over. . . . Yet all those days we never locked a door nor owned
the simplest piece of firearms. We were a feeble few, entirely
at the mercy of the mob when it should come." 24

Then at last the men came. The time was near noon two
days before Christmas (Decejnber 23, 1859) and Fee had been
detained in Cincinnati. The men who came on this December
day were not rowdies in a mob. They were "organized gentle-
men," sixty-two of them, mounted and fully armed, men of
standing and substance from the northern part of the county.
They rode into the Rogers' yard in wedge-shaped formation,
their captain riding a white horse. Mrs. Rogers wrote: "As they
surrounded our little cottage, they looked like a regiment. Mr.
Rogers stepped quickly to the door, I following with our little
first-born clinging to my skirts. The captain, handing my hus-
band a document, asked him for an answer."

Mr. Rogers read the printed paper, and replied that he was
a quiet, law-abiding citizen who had broken no law and had
done nothing to disturb the peace of the commonwealth. He
refused to give up his work in Berea. "I cannot promise to go.
I have only one Master to serve, and I must do his bidding/'
The men moved nearer as if for attack, but the captain, wheel-
ing before them, cried out, "Not today, boys. If he is not gone

Early Founders 17

in ten days, come back.'* They rode away in the snow to deliver
the same message to Mrs. Fee, to Hanson, and to eight others
on their list, and then rode off. 25

That evening the Bereans under ban of exile met in the
district schoolhouse, which was also the church, to counsel to-
gether. Hanson read aloud the thirty-seventh Psalm, which
seemed like the voice of God speaking words of courage to
them: "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers." Some wished
to stay, defying fear; others advised that they leave, to avoid
bloodshed in the peaceful community. Next day they decided
to petition the governor for protection. Two of the banned
men took the petition to Frankfort in person. This paper stated
clearly their innocence and their danger, and was signed by
eleven men. Governor Beriah Magoffin received them courte-
ously, but refused the Bereans protection because of the excite-
ment of the public mind. If they would leave at once, he would
assure them of protection during departure. 20 Upon receipt of
this message the Bereans decided to leave as soon as possible.

They did not sell their homes nor their chattels, because
they had complete confidence that they would return. They
could take only the most necessary possessions, because trans-
portation from the village was difficult, especially in midwinter.
Before they left, Mr. and Mrs. Wright, old residents on the
Ridge, made a feast and invited the banned families to enjoy it.

The exodus began on the seventh day after the warning. The
day was Thursday, December 29, the weather cold and rainy.
The exiled families gathered under the trees in front of the
Rogers' unfinished cottage, with many neighbors and friends
to see them off. The Reverend George Candee had ridden in
from Jackson County to be with them in their trouble, and as
they stood with bowed heads, he prayed for God's guidance
upon those who were about to leave their dear homes. Later
Mrs. Rogers described the first part of their journey:

"A drizzling rain was falling, the snow had melted, and
everything was dreary without as our hearts within. One old
man sat in an open wagon with his arm around his aged wife

18 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

as if to shield her from every storm. Mrs. Fee with her carriage
full of little children, a bride and a groom in another carriage,
and these, with a few men on horseback and Mr. Davis and his
family, and a great white covered wagon which carried our
trunks, a lady or two, and waiting for me to cliinb into it with
our babies, formed the crowd that was *a menace to Kentucky's
best interests/ ... I took my place under the rude shelter of
the wagon, and the word came to move on.

"At Silver Creek we had to face another trial, and it did
look as though the elements were against us. ... Heavy rains
and melting snows had conspired to make the stream most
dangerous. A sudden halt in consultation, then the horseback
riders rode into the stream. Our great wagon being the
heaviest, we were chosen to cross first. Where we went it was
safe to follow. It certainly was like the Children of Israel pass-
ing over the Red Sea, and like them we were carried safely
through the depths to dry land/' 27

They spent the night in Richmond, the county seat where
the plans for their exile had been laid; but since the exiles were
ahead of time in their exit, they were well treated. Next morn-
ing the Berea group left by stage for Lexington, where they
took the train for Cincinnati.

Cassius M. Clay had much to say about the Berea case. He
and Fee had fought for freedom of speech since the old days
of the True American. Their co-operation (but not their mutual
respect) had suffered a serious break in 1856 when a political
issue was at stake; but they still agreed that free speech was a
much better means of solving problems than the use or threat
of force. Less than two weeks after the Bereaiis left Kentucky,
Cassius M. Clay on January 10, 1860, delivered a long cam-
paign speech from the steps of the State Capitol in Frank-
fort. Before he had gone far in his address, he spoke about the
expulsion of Fee and his companions from the state, saying that
in the matter of expulsion he, Clay, had taken a position of
strict neutrality, though a citizen of Madison County. He re-
gretted that many respectable Kentuckians had been misled

Early Founders 19

into an attack upon so worthy a community, for no better
people lived than those around Berea. Then he reverted to his
earlier idea of the importance of a good community on the
edge of the mountains, and said that John G. Fee had nothing
to lose from this exile, but that the losers were the sons and
daughters of the people for whom Fee and his friends had been
preparing so good an education. 28

After reaching Cincinnati the exiles scattered. Before long
Professor Rogers became the pastor of a church in Decatur,
Ohio. Fee, Hanson, and Davis soon returned to their old homes
in Bracken and Lewis counties; but within a month of the time
when the mounted gentlemen had called in Berea to order the
eleven families to leave, a Bracken County meeting approved
the Madison County action, and ordered the Bereans and some
others to leave because they were dangerous citizens. Fee set-
tled his family on the north side of the Ohio River, close to
Cincinnati.

John G. Hanson's experience was quite different. About
March 1, 1860, he and a companion returned to Berea to saw
three hundred logs left at the mill and possibly to sell his saw-
mill unless there seemed a good chance for him to move back
to Berea soon. Rough men who heard of his return threatened
to take vengeance upon him if he could be taken, and so Han-
son hid in the nearby hills. A month passed, Hanson keeping
well to the woods. One Sunday at the end of March, Clay was
in Berea, and Hanson had a long talk with him. After this
Hanson knew that he would receive no protection from Clay.
The following day the mob returned, fortified with whiskey,
to search for Hanson and hang him. Again he fled to the Jack-
son County hills, while the unruly mob abused men who were
thought to be Hanson supporters. They sent to Lexington for
cannon and raised more volunteers. When they could not find
Hanson, they completely wrecked his mill. John G. Hanson
walked safely through the state and again crossed into Ohio.
Then he wrote, like the good Christian that he was: "When I
reflect what I had at heart and wished to do for my countrymen

20 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

in Kentucky, and think of what I have received at their hands,
it makes rne weep and love them more, as they show by their
madness that they know not what they do." 29

'But it was not only Hanson who suffered loss from the
roistering rabble. Before finally leaving Berea they had warned
fifteen more families that they must be gone in ten days. Clay's
list gives the number in each family forced away from home,
making a total of ninety-four.

VIII

FEE AND ROGERS were so eager to return to their work in the
Berea neighborhood that each year they made one or more
ventures into Kentucky to learn whether they would have free-
dom to preach a whole gospel there. They were anxious also
that the young community should not be demoralized or scat-
tered from discouragement. They soon heard the good news
that "Ham" Rawlings* daughter was teaching the district school
in Berea. Then Fee heard from Renfro, the one remaining
school trustee, that he was having difficulty in collecting school
money: "Bro. Fee, . . . You understand how it is with me as a
trustee. The subscribers many of them had to leave, so I am
left minus." 30

Fee, reminding himself that reactions generally follow gross
outrages, wrote several articles and a new tract in the first year
after his expulsion, and preached in Ohio and Indiana; but his
heart cried out within him for Kentucky, his chosen field of
labor. He set about raising the money due for the Woolwine
tract in Berea, and by the close of 1860 had paid off $1,460 of
the $1,750 due for the land, though he was in exile. In the early
summer of 1862 he and Mrs. Fee prospected safely in Madison
and neighboring counties. He preached two Sundays in Berea
to a larger congregation than had ever been known there be-
fore, and on July 4 between these two Sabbaths he and George
Candee gave addresses on the nature of liberty to an orderly,

Early Founders 21

interested audience. 31 After this experience the Fees decided
that they were warranted in bringing their children to Berea.
About the same time Rogers visited Berea, looked over the

cottage that he had left unfinished, and concluded that he
could soon reopen the school. Though he returned to Ohio for
the summer, he came again to Berea on August 27, 1862, and
found Union troops along the road from Richmond to Berea.
This highway running north from Tennessee through the Cum-
berland Gap to the Ohio River was so close to Berea that some-
times the village people heard the Civil War knocking at their
east door. Rogers learned that the way was clear and so passed
through tented fields homeward to Berea.

About the same time Mrs. Fee drove home to Berea with
her two older children in her buggy. She had been stopped
along the way, but her quiet explanations and the Union flag
painted on her carriage enabled her to pass through the lines.
She arrived in Berea on the eve of battle, but she did not find
Fee there as she had expected. On Saturday, August 30, the
battle of Richmond was fought on the Richmond Pike between
Big Hill (southeast of Berea) and Richmond. By the close of
day the Union troops had been defeated and much of eastern
Kentucky, including Berea, was left under the sway of the Con-
federate army. R.ogers wrote: "The booming of the cannon
during Saturday's fight, which we could hear with great dis-
tinctness at Berea, was a doleful sound to our ears." 32

Fee on the day of the battle was trying to ride from Rich-
mond to Berea. With his eleven-year-old son he had taken the
boat for Cincinnati at the same time that Mrs. Fee set out for
Madison County. When he had finished a matter of printing
business, he took the train and stage for Richmond. There he
hired a horse to complete his journey. Father and son rode
halfway to Berea, but meeting the Union forces in retreat at
Kingston, they turned back to Richmond. Fee speedily took
his son to safety in Bracken County, intending to go south
again for his wife; but while waiting for the boat at Augusta, a
mob took him by force to the Ohio side of the river under

22 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

threat that if he returned again, they would certainly hang him.
Their only charge against him was that of being an abolitionist.
When he returned to Bracken County, he was again treated
roughly and put across the river with fierce threats. Com-
munications with the interior had been cut, and he was in
great anxiety lest Mrs. Fee suffer from shortage of money. His
best friends insisted that she was safer behind the Confederate
lines without him than with him, and so ten weeks dragged by
from the time when the Fees had set out for Berea by different
routes. 33

Mrs. Fee was undaunted by the succession of events.
Strange what one remembers about a day that turns out to be
very different from other days! She remembered that on the
day of the battle she was mending a bedstead, and Rogers
down Chestnut Street remembered that he was working on his
roof that day. Presently she hid her horse and buggy in the
woods so that they would not be stolen. She wrapped her silver
spoons in a flag and hid the bundle under the eaves. Soldiers
and officers passing along Chestnut Street stopped to look at
her roses and to speak a word with her over the fence. 34 After
the battle of Perryville elsewhere in the state in October, the
troops of occupation gradually withdrew. Late in the fall Mrs.
Fee's mother drove from Bracken County in her carriage and
took the little Berea family back to Fee. 35 After this harass-
ing experience he settled his wife and children in New Rich-
mond, Ohio, with his friends the Parkers, who conducted an
academy there, thus giving his children a chance for a good
schooling during the next two years.

Rogers stayed in Berea about six weeks this autumn. There
were persistent rumors that some day the Confederates would
hang him, and so he had better keep in hiding out in the hills;
but in time all anxiety dropped from him, and he said that
these weeks were among the most pleasant of his life. He rode
a circuit of about a hundred miles in the hill country to visit
the rural churches whose antislavery pastors had been driven
out. When he was in Berea, he worked on his new house,

Early Founders 23

preached, studied, and visited much, from house to house. In
mid October while Kentucky was still swarming with Con-
federate troops and Union Home Guards, he rode his horse
Rosa four days "through highways and byways, woods and
fields" to reach the Ohio, and swam her across the river to
safety, having on the way "many adventures and apparently
narrow escapes/' 36

The early winter of 1863 saw Fee preaching again in Berea
and the adjacent mountain communities, to strengthen them
by his words and his presence. In February, 1864, the people
of the Berea community on and around the Ridge held an all-
day meeting with "a most bountiful basket dinner" between
Fee's morning and afternoon addresses. All were invited to eat
at a common table, and "past discussions and persecutions
were forgotten in the greetings of the assembled crowd." A
few slaveholders were present, and parts of two families of
slaves. In the morning Fee spoke on the duty of sustaining gov-
ernments, and in the afternoon on immediate emancipation. 37

Two months later Fee moved his family, including a new
baby, back to Berea again, although there was still some raid-
ing in the region. The following September, 1864, before the
three-months district school began, he opened the subscription
school, the "good Rogers school," with seventy-three pupils,
most of them children, but some ten or twelve young men and
women. Rogers had not yet returned. The teaching was done
by an old man hired by the day, Fee and his daughter Laura,
and Mrs. Fee, who helped with the very little ones. This was
Berea College again, welcomed back by the people in their
need.

Soon after returning in the spring of 1864, Fee took up a
new interest. One day he and his oldest son Burritt rode horse-
back to Camp Nelson, thirty-five miles to the northwest, be-
cause he had heard that Negro troops there were being organ-
ized into regiments. The next Sunday he went among these
soldiers and in the evening preached to several thousand of
them. It was his first experience in preaching to a large as-

24 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

sembly of Negro people, a moving occasion to him. It was as
though freedom that night had actually come, though the war
was not yet over. Before this time his messages on slavery had
been messages to white men, with occasionally a few Negroes
present, usually slaves. Now there flooded over him a sense
of duty to provide pastors and teachers for the new freedmen.

He did not wait until a future time of nationwide emancipa-
tion, but began his work there among the free troops at Camp
Nelson. He asked the quartermaster at the camp to let him
have a place for regular preaching, and the officer added that
the men needed teaching too. Before long Fee secured the
gift of a bell, and mounted it on a derrick in camp, to call the
Negro soldiers to class and to worship. "This was a time of
thrilling interest to me," he wrote. "I had long been shunned
... by those who had a secret sympathy with me, and had
long been hated and persecuted by others." 38 In his inner heart
he had paid a price for his uncompromising stand on slavery.
When Rogers visited Kentucky in the late summer of this year
( 1864), he found Fee and another minister along with thirteen
volunteer teachers hard at work teaching Negro troops.

After the coming of peace three Berea trustees, Fee, Rogers,
and Hanson, met in April, 1865, to make Berea College more
than a phantom college. Their first business was to pass a reso-
lution of thanks to God for carrying them safely through the
years of violence. They then agreed to open the College early
in the coming year, and to seek money with which to erect a
suitable building. 39

Although the trustees had drawn up a Constitution that was
accepted in July, 1859, before the exodus, the College had not
yet been incorporated because of certain legal delays, chief of
which was an insufficient number of trustees. Now at the end
of the war only three of the original trustees were left, and so
seven new trustees were selected. They completed the in-
corporation of Berea College on April 5, 1866. Then on May
23, 1866, since the College was now able to hold land, they
secured a deed for the Woolwine tract.

Early Founders 25

According to its first catalog (1866-1867), the "Berea Liter-
ary Institute," as the catalog called it, had a total attendance
of 187, of whom 96 were Negroes and 91 whites. Emancipa-
tion had changed the constituency of the Berea institution
while it was still in its swaddling clothes.

CHAPTER

.

: rounders during
Reconstruction

IN FINANCIAL matters the best friend of the youthful Berea
College after the Civil War was the American Missionary
Association (A.M. A.). The second publicity pamphlet of the
new school (1867) made acknowledgment of the school's debt
of gratitude to this Association, "without whose fostering care
it never could have existed." 1 Sometimes members of the As-
sociation spoke of the A.M.A. as the founder of Berea College,
as in a resolution of 1869 which referred to Berea as the "first
of the institutions founded by the Association in the South to
enter a regular college class." 2

The A.M.A. did not make the plan to found a higher school
on the Ridge, nor take a conscious part in shaping its Constitu-
tion, nor in selecting its teachers; the Association did not give
Berea College money for buildings, land, or scholarships; but
it did render certain services, especially in the first decade of
the College's corporate life, that entitle it to recognition as
one of the founders of the College. J. A. R. Rogers wrote in
1882: "The friends of the American Missionary Association
have made the College largely what it is, and it certainly
would not be right to pay no attention to their wisdom and
work." 3

Founders during Reconstruction 27

The fostering care of the A.M.A. took three forms: (1)
providing small basic salaries in the early years; (2) furnishing
access to benevolent people through a widely read magazine,
the American Missionary, and social contacts at the Associa-
tion's annual meeting; (3) recommending Berea College to
donors as a wise investment in Christian education. Berea Col-
lege did not begin its career with a large endowment, nor with
any college building, nor with a farm for a manual labor pro-
gram; but it did begin with certain ideas expressed in the Con-
stitution and with a character that had been tested by per-
secution.

On its fiftieth anniversary in 1896 the A.M.A. sent a greeting
to Berea as "the earliest college founded by its missionaries." 4
John G. Fee had been commissioned as a rural minister in 1848
when the A.M.A. was very young, and he had remained on its
payroll of commissioned ministers for the following thirty-four
years. When he came to serve as a minister in the vicinity of
the Ridge, he received from the A.M.A. $400 a year, and when
J. A. R. Rogers joined Fee in the Berea work in 1858, he too
received $400 a year as a rural minister, for the A.M.A. was
then engaged in religious, not in educational work. After the
war when there was a pressing need in the South for edu-
cational as well as religious work, the Association frequently
rendered help in the form of salaries to schools that were doing
a much-needed service. In the annual report of the A.M.A.,
1869, three men and six women in Berea College were listed as
receiving part of their salary from the A.M.A. 5 Secretary J. E.
Roy of the A.M.A. in an obituary of John G. Fee in 1901 sum-
med up the situation when he wrote: "The Association never
made any appropriation toward the support of the College di-
rectly; it was furnishing stipends to the missionaries who with
Mr. Fee were becoming its founders." 6

The Association's American Missionary welcomed the let-
ters of Fee, Rogers, and E. Henry Fairchild, the first president
of the College, which were sure to give a lively picture of re-
cent events not only in Berea but in the outlying work. Hun-

28 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

dreds of people gave money year after year simply because in
the American Missionary they had read articles written by
Berea workers. Such letters would end with the simplest of
appeals: "Will friends help? I will acknowledge the receipt of
every dollar through the American Missionary" or "I pray this
may attract the attention of some of God's stewards."

The annual meeting of the A.M.A. was usually attended by
John G. Fee, J. A. R. Rogers, or President Fairchild. The dele-
gate from Berea usually served on some committee and might
even be invited to give an address. The meeting would be fol-
lowed by invitations to fill several pulpits after the three-day
convention had closed; and thus through the living word of a
Fee, a Rogers, or a Fairchild further chances were given to
present Berea's cause to prospective donors. It was through the
fellowship of the annual meeting that Rogers and Fee became
acquainted with General O. O. Howard, long an active member
of the A.M.A., who as commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau
had it in his power to give Berea its first college building and
money for freedmen ? s scholarships.

It meant a great deal in those early days to be recommended
by the A.M.A, In a publicity pamphlet of 1866 bearing the
headline "Commendations," there were two pages of recom-
mendations of the Berea undertaking, including along with the
good words of the chief justice of the United States Supreme
Court, the governor of Ohio, and the president of Yale Uni-
versity, the commendatory words of the president of the A.M.A.
and four of its lesser officials.

There were men of substance who would hesitate to turn
over money directly to Berea College, a young institution far
away in a small Kentucky village where there was neither a
railroad nor a bank; but they would deposit a considerable
donation with the A.M.A. at its New York office. The Ham-
mond and Dike scholarship funds were built up by deposits of
$5,000 at a time until $30,000 was reached, and the care of this
money rested for many years with the A.M.A. The Beers gift
consisted of railroad bonds which were deposited with the

JOHN G. FEE
A Founder of Berea College

BEREA COLLEGE DURING THE FAIRCHILD ADMINISTRATION

Top: Ladles' (Fairchild) Hall-Gothic Chapel-Lincoln Hall

Bottom; Library, second floor of Lincoln Hall

Founders during Reconstruction 29

A.M.A., and the TuthiU King fund was handled in the same
manner.

In 1868 on the suggestion of the A.M. A. a district secretary,
the Reverend E. M. Cravath, was added to the Berea Board of
Trustees, which up to this time had consisted largely of local
men. The A.M.A. secretary in asking for this change wrote to
John G. Fee, chairman of the Berea Board, saying that the
officers of the Association felt to a certain extent responsible
for its correct management and the wise administration of its
trusts. 7

It was because of these relations that Secretary J. E. Roy
wrote with a clear understanding of the situation in the earlier
decades: "The A.M. A. by its publications and its limited aid
was serving the part of foster parent, and so in this way Mr.
Fee and the College were receiving much of support from the
Association, and the Association became indebted to them as
standard-bearers of its cause of impartial education in the
South/' 8

ii

BEREA'S FIRST president, the Reverend E. Henry Fairchild
(1869-1889) certainly should be named among the founders.
He was fifty-four years of age when he came to Berea, a year
older than Fee and thirteen years older than Professor Rogers.
He had had experience as a pastor, a teacher, and a successful
financial agent; but it was his experience as an executive that
most directly prepared him for the Berea work. For sixteen
years this wise and gifted man as principal of Oberlin's pre-
paratory department had studied over practical problems of
human management at a time when this branch of Oberlin
College numbered more than five hundred students. Moreover,
his long-continued relations with Oberlin had given him an
understanding of principles also fundamental to Berea.

This Henry Fairchild, whose father, like J. A. R. Rogers'
father, had moved long since from New England to northern

SO Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Ohio, had had his youthful antislavery concern intensified by
certain college experiences. He was a twenty-year-old fresh-
man of Oberlin College when the "Lane rebels" came to
Oberlin to enter the Seminary, because they had been ordered
by the trustees of Lane Theological Seminary to cease their
disturbing antislavery discussions. Henry Fan-child was pres-
ent on that day in 1835 when these students were welcomed to
Oberlin. 9

Before the end of the fall term Theodore D. Weld, the
leader of the Lane rebels in Cincinnati, came to visit them. He
delivered a series of more than twenty lectures on slavery, and
both Henry Fairchild and his brother James were profoundly
influenced by these talks; "lectures of marvellous power/' wrote
James Fairchild, "all charged with facts, with logic, and with
fervid eloquence. To listen to such an exhibition of the system
of slavery, was an experience to be remembered for a lifetime.
. . . From first to last, through the evenings of three full weeks,
the whole body of citizens and students hung upon his lips. . . .
Oberlin was abolitionized in every thought and feeling and
purpose." 10

Under the influence of Weld, Henry Fairchild became one
of the "Seventy,' 7 commissioned while still a college student to
spread the emancipation ideas of the American Antislavery
Society into the Middle West. This work he carried on dur-
ing his long winter and summer vacations, teaching refugee
Negroes in Cincinnati and giving addresses in Pennsylvania
and Ohio even though his meetings were frequently disturbed.
While the abuse that he encountered was mild compared with
that which Fee suffered for many years in Kentucky, yet in
retrospect it made a bond of understanding between the two
men. In essence the bond that united John G. Fee, J. A. R.
Rogers, Henry Fairchild, and the members of the A.M.A. was
the moral ferment in which these men had spent their youth,
a ferment which was the social cause of the founding of Berea
College, a ferment which in these devoted men showed itself
before the Civil War in antislavery ardor and after emancipa-

Founders during Reconstruction 31

tion in the will to bring education to the disadvantaged,
whether born free or in bondage.

When Henry Fairchild came to Berea as president, he found
the College already provided with a satisfactory constitution
and a legal charter. Soon after obtaining this charter in 1866,
the College had received an endowment of $10,000. The en-
rollment consisted of about three hundred students, two-thirds
of whom were below the rank of the Academy and slightly
more than half of whom were Negro. The first college class
was registered in the September following President Fairchild's
arrival in Berea in the spring of 1869.

Fairchild soon perceived that the material needs of the
infant institution were permanent buildings, increased endow-
ment, scholarships, and more income for current expenses.
Without these things the College would die almost before it
was born. In the twenty years of his administration he had
unusual success in providing these necessities.

When he took up his duties in 1869, he found that the
school had moved from the district school neighborhood to the
Woolwine purchase. The classrooms were in and around the
Chapel, which was located south of the present Tabernacle.
It was a rough frame building, whitewashed inside and out-
side. In front it had a lean-to for the use of the janitor and the
bell ringer. On the roof of the shed was an open belfry. This
Chapel was divided into classrooms by movable partitions
which could be swung so as to unite the schoolrooms into an
auditorium for service. Clustered around this building were
several frame classrooms and two small houses for boys' dormi-
tories. Where Fairchild Hall is now located, there was a two-
story frame house to serve as a rooming house for girls and as a
boarding hall. Many students lived with town families.

This was not all, however, that the new president saw on
the "college green." Near the makeshift Chapel a new building
was being erected, a three-story hall for men, a dignified frame
dormitory which the catalogs for many years called "com-
modious" and which President Fairchild in his inaugural ad-

32 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

dress referred to as "the noble one." Small wonder, I would
say, considering the other structures around, for this hall would
accommodate eighty-two "young gentlemen" and cost $18,000,
the gift of the Freedmen's Bureau upon the recommendation
of General O. O. Howard. It was the first campus structure in
Berea that looked like a college hall, even though it was not
built of stone or brick.

in

PRESIDENT FAIRCHILD saw clearly that a proper dormitory was
urgently needed for the young ladies, and four years after his
arrival he dedicated a beautiful brick building that was much
more "commodious" and "noble" than Howard Hall. This large
dormitory, which cost $50,000, towered above the village as
though it were a medieval cathedral looking over its little town.
A tradition about Ladies' Hall related that when a railroad
surveyor looking through his theodolite first saw this brick
building towering above the forest, he dropped his notebook
and exclaimed, "Whoever put up that building in this wilder-
ness must have had faith!" 11 The faith was that of the new
president, supported by Fee, Rogers, Hanson, and two eastern
businessmen, R. R. Graves and his brother E. A. Graves, who
saw the dawning in the South.

It was easy enough for the trustee committee in March,
1870, to accept President Fairchild's suggestion that the plan
of the new dormitory "be essentially the same as that of the
Ladies' Hall at Oberlin," 12 but they had no mind to build ahead
of their funds. In the fall of 1870 they were able to let the con-
tract for moving an old building off the chosen site. Presently
they were driving stakes to locate this Ladies' Hall. In 1871
President Fairchild and his committee ventured to order bricks
to be made in the brickyard south of the site, stone to be quar-
ried not far from the village, and lumber to be prepared from
the adjoining forests, including butternut and chestnut for the

Founders during Reconstruction 33

varnished wood finishings. It was not until spring, 1872, that
money began to roll in from the Graves brothers, who were
practical businessmen holding high positions in the A.M.A.
Such progress was made in donations and construction that
the building could be dedicated on September 24, 1873. 13

The college catalog for 1873-1874 succinctly described the
building: "A Ladies' Hall of brick, three stories high, contain-
ing well lighted and well ventilated rooms for ninety-six young
ladies, besides parlors, assembly room, library, reading room,
dining room, kitchen, laundry rooms, etc. ... An equal number
of gentleman students can be accommodated with table board
at the Hall." Elegance is, of course, a relative term, and there
was an unmistakable elegance about this building. Although
the two upper floors were heated by small wood stoves, the
first floor rooms were heated by a furnace. The only elevator
in the village was in Ladies' Hall, and this elevator, worked by
ropes and a wood boy, carried wood to the second and third
floors for the young ladies. There were water tanks in the attic,
filled from a cistern with a pump at ground level. Room rent
without provision for linen and laundry cost seventy-five cents
a month, and ten years later the charge was the same.

President Fairchild was too modest a man to name the build-
ing from himself, though he had taken so large a part in pro-
viding it; but in 1937, almost fifty years after his death, the
College changed the name from Ladies' Hall to Fairchild Hall
in his honor. The interior of the building has been modernized
by the introduction of electricity and central heat, but the ex-
terior remains much the same, even to the widow's walk on the
northeast side of the roof. Instead of two hundred young men
and women eating in the boarding hall of this building, eight
hundred are now fed at its cafeteria.

In 1874, the year after Ladies' Hall was finished, President
Fairchild wrote: "A Chapel with two or three schoolrooms, all
of which could be built for $10,000, are greatly needed. With
these the College would have all its essential facilities for many
years." 14 No plans for such a building were made, however,

34 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

until the old Chapel burned to the ground on New Year's Eve,
1878. To be more accessible, this new Chapel was built close
to Chestnut Street. A frame building that would seat about
five hundred people, it was in excellent style, suggestive of
Gothic. It had its own kind of elegance, double lancet windows,
a beautiful bell tower, a furnace, and gas lights. It looked
like a Chapel, just as Howard Hall looked like a college hall of
residence.

In the same week of 1879 in which the trustee committee
decided upon the site for a new Chapel, they began a discus-
sion which eventually led to the building of a beautiful recita-
tion hall: "The question was discussed at length relative to
President Fairchild going out among our friends and those of
the late William Lloyd Garrison, with a view to raising funds
to erect a memorial building in which to place our library, the
varied belongings of the different scientific departments, and
in which should be located the college offices. Much interest
was shown in the discussion, but no action was taken." 15 It was
six years before the money for such a building was available.
In 1884 Roswell Smith, president of the Century Company and
a founder of the Century Magazine and the Century Dictionary,
sent $1,000 through the A.M.A. for Berea's current expenses.
The following June, 1885, he attended Berea's Commencement
exercises in company with his literary friend George W. Cable.
Among the guests present on that notable day were also Gen-
eral Cassius M. Clay and Judge W. M. Beckner of Kentucky,
and among the senior orators was the eloquent William E. Bar-
ton. When Roswell Smith in looking over the college plant
saw the great need for classrooms, library space, and offices, he
remarked that we should begin to make bricks. Reminded how
hard it was to "make bricks without straw," he replied, "Put
me down for five thousand for straw." 16 When the visitors left
the campus after this wonderful day, President Fairchild wrote
with unconcealed satisfaction: "It was a new thing in our ex-
perience that a prominent business man from New York
should, without solicitation, and contrary to programme, call

Founders during Reconstruction 35

for the Tiaf and put down himself $5000 for a new 'Recitation
Hall/ which he saw to be a great want of the College. . . . But
$5000 will only begin it, and the College must not contract a
debt/' 17

The building, when completed, cost $32,000, almost all of
which was given by the donor of the first "straw." It contained
eighteen rooms. The first floor rooms were used for classrooms
and offices, the second floor for the library and more classrooms,
and the third floor for laboratories, museum, and society rooms.
When the donor was asked to name the beautiful building, he
wished it named not from himself but from Abraham Lincoln;
and after the dedication of Lincoln Hall at Commencement,
1887, he sent for the building a choice bas-relief of Lincoln
done in bronze by J. S. Hartley. Roswell Smith put into this
structure more than money. He was a cultivated city man who
wished the new hall to be well designed and beautified by
structural refinements. He provided the architect and wrote
many letters regarding details of the building. It is now more
than two-thirds of a century since Lincoln Hall was con-
structed, yet it seems today neither old-fashioned nor outworn.

During the Fairchild administration of twenty years, the
college endowment increased from $10,000 to slightly more
than $100,000. By the time of President Fairchild's death, the
annual income from invested endowment funds amounted to
almost $5,000, but the cost of instruction was twice this amount,
and the salary aid of the A.M. A. was gradually withdrawn in
the early 1880 ? s in accordance with the Association's policy of
ending financial assistance as soon as a school seemed able to
be self-sustaining.

In those days Berea charged a small tuition fee. Between
1872 and 1876 the Dike and Hammond funds were secured, an
endowment the income of which was used to provide seventy-
two scholarships for students needing help. Since Berea Col-
lege was intended for students of small means, and since there
was not yet a labor program sufficient to care for the students
needing help, ceaseless effort had to be made to keep down

36 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

the cost of board and room, and the Income from the student
aid funds was essential to the very existence of the institution.

President Fairchild bore successfully the responsibility for
meeting these problems.

IV

FROM THE BEGINNING of his term of office, President Fairchild
was concerned with problems of improved public services for
the community. The Ridge needed better connections with the
outside world, especially with the county seat to the north and
the timber lands of the mountains eastward. As Berea was not
yet an incorporated village, it had neither a mayor nor a town
council; so it remained for President Fairchild and his Pru-
dential Committee to do the work of a mayor and council, and
perhaps also of a Chamber of Commerce, in securing the
needed civic facilities that lay within their reach. For in-
stance, in 1872 President Fairchild and the Committee sub-
scribed $1,000 to the Kingston and Boone's Gap turnpike,
secured by ten lots along the pike, on condition that "the pike
be opened to Berea passing over the Ridge." 18 After the Pru-
dential Committee voted to donate $3,000 to secure the right
of way of the proposed Kentucky Central Railroad through
Berea, some trustees rebuked this Committee for pledging so
large a sum when the College already had a $10,000 debt, "We
see nothing in the prospective enhancement of the college
property to warrant the giving away so large a sum." 19 The
single-track railroad, when it was eventually approved, did not
go more than thirty miles south of Berea ? to be sure; but on
the north it made connections with Cincinnati, and thanks to
the toll roads leading out of the mountains to the new railroad
station at Berea and similar villages along the railway, the
lumber from the mountainslogs, staves, crossties, and tanbark
found a way to market. It mattered little that the only pas-
senger service on this line was on a mixed freight and passenger

Founders during Reconstruction S?

train. Thanks to the leadership of President Fan-child, business
was coming into Berea.

When President Fair child came to Berea, Kentucky was
full of violence. Some of this was the work of Ku Klux men,
but much of it was organized rowdyism to avenge old grudges
or to keep Negroes in a state of fear and white men in order.
In both editions of President Fairchild's history there is the
plain statement: "The Ku Klux never paid us a visit. Many
rumors of their hostile intentions have reached us, and rumors
that our college buildings and some of our private houses had
been burned have been spread through the country; but from
what we knew of their operations near us, we did not appre-
hend any disturbance from them." 20 There was a certain an-
noyance from intoxicated country fellows who shouted and
occasionally fired their pistols recklessly as they rode through
town. Once a shot passed through President Fairchild's window,
but it injured no one. People said that the rowdies liked to see
how near they could come to shooting the college bell as they
galloped along Chestnut Street and clattered over the foot-
bridge near the president's house, but men like Fairchild, Fee,
Rogers, and Hanson did not live in fear.

The institution of an excursion to the mountains goes back
to 1875, when the faculty voted that such a spring excursion
might be made under the conduct of President Fairchild. 21
Year after year this college picnic was held, some years in the
spring, some years in the gorgeous autumn; but the most memo-
rable Mountain Day in the Fairchild administration was in the
spring of 1886. By this time there was a college paper, the
Berea College Reporter., and the issue of June, 1886, gave a full
account of the great day. Some groups made arrangements to
ride, but more than a hundred preferred to walk the three miles
to the Pinnacle. The brass band went early to West Pinnacle
and "was discoursing sweet music" as the rest of the students
climbed the steep incline. The food wagons took their baskets
of food to a spring halfway between the valley and East
Pinnacle. The picnickers inspected the Rockhouse, squeezed

38 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

through Fat Man's Misery, risked the Devil's Slide, and wan-
dered around Indian Fort. At East Pinnacle they sat on the
rocks, telling stories, singing songs, and wishing that they could
climb Pilot Knob far across the valley. They returned home by
way of the Crater near Blue Lick. There was no hunger like
Mountain Day hunger, and no memory like that of Mountain
Day, or so it seemed as they dragged their tired feet homeward
at the close of the day. Mountain Day left a much better
flavor than pistol toting or knife swaggering.

While President Fairchild was a founder in providing a
material foundation of buildings, endowment, and scholarships,
improved connections with the outside world, better public
utilities inside the village, and a pattern of student life that
was both Christian and humane, his greatest work was prob-
ably in the field of race relations. The race situation was not
like that in Oberlin, where the Negroes constituted a very small
minority of the student body. On the Berea campus at least half
the students were Negroes. With great wisdom and kindness
President Fairchild guided hundreds of young Negroes into
the fellowship of an educated Negro-white society, and hun-
dreds of young white students into an understanding of the
Negroes* problems and the Negroes* worth. That this social
experiment could prove successful in a former slave state so
soon after the Civil War and legal emancipation adds interest
to the study of Berea's century of interface relations.

When President Fairchild died, the college paper wrote
that the way to build him a more enduring monument than the
hills that watched his grave would be to confirm and extend his
Christian principles of liberty and impartiality. 22

CHAPTER

: A Century of
Interrace Education

BEREA COLLEGE from 1866 to 1904 educated both Negro
and white students. During this time the College relieved some
pressing social needs and learned important lessons in social
adjustment, though it cannot be said to have solved the hardest
problems of Negro-white education.

When compelled by the passage of a state law to forego
interracial education, the College chose to continue in Ken-
tucky as a white school. However, it provided for a well-
endowed Negro school in the Bluegrass area of Kentucky,
where the Negro people were especially numerous. In the
years that followed, Berea College repeatedly showed its con-
cern over Negro education, and in 1950 when it could once
more admit Negroes legally under certain conditions, it again
registered Negroes in its classes, though they were few in
number.

ii

ALREADY IN 1859 feeling was running high as to whether Pro-
fessor Rogers should be allowed to use the district school build-
ing for his subscription school if Negroes were admitted. In

40 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

March of that year Jokn G. Fee wrote to Gerrit Smith: "The
opposition party called a meeting to vote him out of the school-
house. They could not get the people to vote against the school
when they were convened. We have now quite a large majority
in favor of the school/' 1 The question of admitting Negroes to
a private school did not face the patrons as a practical matter,
however 5 till after the Civil War.

Before the war there were plenty of men in Kentucky who
were opposed to the institution of slavery, but were "caste-
men" instead of what Fee called "anti-caste," that is, they were
not yet reconciled to the idea that freedmen might ride in a
white coach, partake of communion along with white church
members, and attend school with whites. When slavery came
to an end at the close of the war, Berea had to struggle with
the problem of the Negroes' social privileges; and Berea Col-
lege, for which a constitution had been made and land bought
to serve as a campus, lost some of its students and even some
of its trustees on the issue of the admission of Negro students
to the Rogers-Fee school.

The problem of Negro attendance was faced in the first
term after the war. By a compromise the first two months of
this term were to be considered as part of the district school,
and therefore Negroes would not be admitted until March 1,
"so that none might make charge of usurping privileges in using
the district house." At the same time John G. Hanson "as
architect and builder for the College" was directed to build
before September two new cottages where classes might be
held without offense to any patrons of the district. 2

Early in March, 1866, the first Negro pupils were admitted.
W. W. Wheeler, assistant to Professor Rogers, reported later
that the attendance for the term was low "on account of ab-
sence of 27 members who unceremoniously and in a disgrace-
ful manner left the school at the end of two months on account
of the presence of colored children who had been admitted to
equal privileges with others." 3 Across the road from the school-
house the wives of the two teachers sat at a window of Berea's

A Century of Intenace Education 41

first boarding hall, which was managed by Wheeler and his
wife.

Since it was against the law to enroll Negroes in the district
school, Mrs. Wheeler had been teaching several Negro children
in her own. quarters. On this March day they could enroll in
the private Rogers-Wheeler school, which met by agreement
in the district schoolhouse since the new buildings were un-
finished. Mrs. Wheeler later wrote: "From the front window
Mrs. Rogers and I watched the little black children enter on
that memorable day, and watched until we saw the flight of
the white boys and girls."

In April of this year, 1866, several adult Negroes registered
in the school, one of whom was Angus A. Burleigh, a sergeant
who had met Fee at Camp Nelson. Someone had told the
sergeant that a man wanted to see him at the chaplain's office.
"There was a small man, grey of hair and with kindly face,"
wrote Burleigh in later years. "He arose as I entered, and took
me by the hand. 1 am Mr. Fee/ he said, 'John. G. Fee.' " Fee
had asked Sergeant Burleigh what he intended to do when
war ended. When the sergeant had replied that he meant to
get an education, Fee had said that he was looking for young
men to go to Berea for schooling and that everyone would have
a chance to work his way through school. "He took out of his
pocket a small notebook. ... 'I have here forty-one names,
and yours will make the forty-second. Will you come?' " When
Angus Burleigh had said that he would come as soon as he was
mustered out, Fee had told him to take the stage to Lexington
and change for Richmond. From Richmond, he had said, it
was only a fourteen-mile walk to Berea. When the sergeant
arrived in Berea, he found a welcome. "Mrs. Fee met me at
the door with the same gentle smile she always had. Next
morning bright and early I was in the school embarked on an
education." He was assigned to Professor Rogers' room. Before
long he was converted and was baptized in Brushy Fork. Nine
years later he graduated from Berea College with a B.A. de-
gree. 5

42 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

in

THEKE CAME A TIME in Berea's history, especially before and
after the passage of the Day law (1904), when many people,
both white and Negro, believed that Berea College was founded
for the Negro people; and in the decades since 1911 even more
people have believed that it was founded specifically for the
people of the southern Appalachian mountains.

From the first Constitution, approved in 1859, until a re-
vision made in 1911 the purpose of the College was stated to
be the promotion of the cause of Christ by offering a thorough
education to all persons of good moral character. No special
preference was given in this statement to any one group of
people. 6 From other sources than the Constitution itself it is
clear that from the earliest days of the school the founders in-
tended it to be for all people regardless of race. Already in 1855
John G. Fee had spoken of the school as an anticaste institu-
tion; 7 and in 1858 Professor Rogers declared that he would not
teach the Berea school unless it was open to all. 8 In the first
catalog (1866-1867) appeared two paragraphs under the title
"The school is greatly needed." The first paragraph spoke of
the need of the Negro people for a higher school in the state;
and the second spoke of the educational need of the white
people of the mountains of Kentucky and adjoining states.

After the Civil War the freedmen poured into Berea to
secure the magic of education. The catalog of 1866-1867 listed
187 pupils, of whom 96 were Negro, 91 white. In 1875-1876
there were 237 enrolled, of whom 143 were Negro, 94 white.
In the total enrollment of 369 in 1880-1881, 249 were Negro,
120 white. In the last year of President Fairchild's administra-
tion, 177 were Negro, 157 white. In one year only between
1866 and 1894, namely 1877-1878, did the record show more
whites than Negroes, 144 to 129.

In 1869 the first freshman class of the College Department
was enrolled, and in 1873 the first degrees were bestowed upon

A Century of Interlace Education 43

graduates who liad completed an exacting four-year course.
During the sixteen years between 1873 and the close of the
Fairchild administration, 1889, forty-three four-year degrees
were awarded, thirty of them to white students, thirteen to
Negroes. Although in the lower departments the Negroes al-
most always outnumbered the whites, the Negroes were less
numerous than the whites in the College Department because:
( 1 ) the Negroes had to start lower in Berea's school system be-
cause of previous lack of preparation; (2) they were more
likely to stay out of school for an occasional term to work; (3)
they were more needed as teachers, especially after 1874, when
the first public schools for Negroes were set up by law in Ken-
tucky.

Even though Negro graduates were few in this period, they
became outstanding leaders, especially in education. Eleven
of the thirteen Negro graduates became teachers, one a lawyer,
and one a minister. Only two were women, both of whom be-
came teachers. The men teachers taught in Louisville, Lexing-
ton, Danville, Covington, Princeton, Somerset, and Maysville.
One of them, John H. Jackson, became the first principal of the
present State College for Negroes in Kentucky, and served for
fourteen years. Another, James S. Hathaway, was its principal
for nine years. It is noteworthy that most of these graduates
came from Kentucky cities, where educational opportunities
for Negroes were better than in the country. Of the eight
from Kentucky, three were from Louisville, three from Lex-
ington, one from Danville, and one from Mount Sterling.

Possibly the Negro teachers who left the Preparatory or
the College Department before graduation were even more
important than the graduates, because they were so much more
numerous. When an Ohio man wrote in 1878 asking President
Fairchild what he could say about Berea College, the president
replied: "Not less than 100 Negro schools were taught last
year by colored teachers educated at Berea." 9 Kentucky did
not at this time have a state normal school for training Negro
teachers.

44 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

IV

PRESIDENT FAIRCHILD in an A.M. A. conference at Nashville in
1881 expressed clearly the reason why he wanted to provide a
college education for as many promising young Negroes as pos-
sible. While his sympathy was with the slow of wit, his hopes
for the advancement of the American Negro lay with those
who were able to do college work. "They must be as well
prepared as white people in every way, in order to secure the
respect of the white people and maintain their own respect/' 10

In his baccalaureate sermon of the same year Fairchild de-
veloped this idea in greater detail: "They need to be scientific
farmers and skilled mechanics, artists and architects and con-
tractors, as well as common farmers. They need to be quali-
fied for magistrates, jurors, lawyers, and judges; for teachers,
preachers, editors, physicians; for professors and presidents of
colleges; for legislators and congressmen; for consuls, ambas-
sadors; in short, for every position which citizens are expected
to occupy." Later in the same address he said: "Not only must
common school education become general and of a high order;
many thousands of colored men and women must become
highly educated graduates of colleges and seminaries; of theo-
logical, medical, and law schools; of musical conservatories
and schools of art. . . . Thorough education, high culture, ex-
alted character, sound judgment, exquisite taste, and eloquent
delivery will win their way in spite of prejudice and custom." 11

On the Berea campus there was no organization and no
activity in which both Negro and white did not share. They
recited in the same classes, sat in the same rows in Chapel,
played on the same baseball team, sang in the same Harmonia
Choral Society, debated in the same literary societies, and ate
at the same boarding hall. In the first issue of the new college
paper, President Fairchild said that with such arrangements
as these the school moved along "in perfect harmony from year
to year, all treating each other with respect." 12

BEREA STUDENTS IN THE 1890 ? s
Top: Zoology laboratory; bottom: Homecooking class

GOTHIC CHAPEL
Built in 1879; destroyed by fire in 1902

A Century of Interrace Education 45

During this administration Negroes were officers as weE as
members of all campus organizations. Take the men's literary
society, Phi Delta. There were five elective offices, and Negroes
were sure to be elected to any two or three of these positions
without discrimination. The minute books show that a Negro
was just as likely as a white man to be elected president. The
Phi Delta weekly programs give firsthand evidence of the good
relations existing between the two races. This society consisted
of such College and Preparatory men as cared to join, and its
motto was "We love discussion." A program consisted of vari-
ous literary offerings, but a meeting without a debate was rare
indeed. In a debate there would be Negroes on each side,
either assigned beforehand or volunteers; but these discussions
were carried on with a tradition of interracial forbearance. One
night in 1882 the subject for discussion was: "Resolved, that
the colored people should emigrate to the mountains of Ken-
tucky." If the debate had been carried on with mountain boys
on one side and Negro boys on the other, the situation might
have been unfortunate; but with an assigned Negro speaker on
each side to lead the discussion, there was no trouble. Upon
this occasion, a situation arose that elsewhere might have been
decided by prejudice. When the treasurer (white) challenged
the negative speaker's right to present his argument because he
had an unpaid fine against him, the Negro's privilege of speak-
ing to the question was upheld by a unanimous vote of the
house. 13

A white member of this literary society, and also of the
brass band and the baseball team in the Fairchild administra-
tion, wrote many years later: "Were I to make a list of former
students whom I would genuinely enjoy meeting again, to sit
down for a chat over old times, I would find a majority of them
colored." 14

The Commencement programs show the same freedom from
caste. In those days instead of an address at the graduating
exercises by some out-of-town speaker, numerous orations and
essays were presented by upper-class students. The ratio of

46 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Negroes to whites on the program was about the same as their
ratio in the College Department, and their subjects were usually
free from racial implications; for example, "Civil Reform/' "A
Judicial View of the Labor Question," and "The Mountains of
Kentucky/ 3

In those times a Ladles' Board of Care assisted the "lady
principal" in handling social regulations. When a resignation
occurred on this Board in 1878, the Prudential Committee chose
a town woman for the vacant place, "providing she is In sym-
pathy with the work of the co-education of the white and
coloured." 15 In 1872 after school closed for the year, the trus-
tees spent two days in thoughtful study of social relations be-
tween the two races. The decisions of the trustees were in sub-
stance as follows: that persons of opposite sex and race should
not be prohibited from attending each other to and from social
gatherings; but if their going together would expose them to
violence or to the charge of impure motives, or if they made
"an offensive display of themselves," then they should not re-
ceive the lady principal's permission. 16 Under this qualified
social freedom the Berea students lived without scandal or
undue tension for seventeen years.

At the post-Commencement meeting of the Berea College
alumni in 1889, with the presiding officer a Negro alumnus
who had become important in Negro education in Kentucky,
the alumni approved the principle that had been expressed in
a recent baccalaureate sermon, namely, that as human beings
they were all equal regardless of race. They requested that the
trustees rely on the wisdom of the faculty and the good judg-
ment of the students as to social relations, 17 and on the follow-
ing day the Board of Trustees acceded to this request. 18

There was a Negro upon the Board of Trustees before there
was a Berea College graduate, Negro or white. This trustee,
the Reverend Gabriel Burdett, known to Fee because of their
work together at Camp Nelson late In the war, was an eloquent
preacher who understood the sensitiveness of educated Negro
men. After twelve years as a trustee he was succeeded in 1879

A Century of Interlace Education 47

by Jordan C. Jackson, a Negro educator of Lexington, Ken-
tucky, who served Berea for sixteen years, a wise man who was
of great help to the Berea administration in its efforts to meet
the Negroes' needs in education. The Negroes continued to
have a Negro member on this Board until James Bond resigned
in 1914.

During the Fairchild administration Berea had two Negro
teachers. Miss Julia Britton taught instrumental music, 1870-
1872, while she was also a student. James S. Hathaway, after
graduating from the College in 1884 with a B.A. degree, was
appointed instructor (tutor) in Latin and mathematics. When
he did not receive a professorship, his unfulfilled ambition
tended to embitter him and some other young Negro intel-
lectuals. 19

WHEN WILLIAM G. FROST, professor of Greek in Oberlin Col-
lege, became the president of Berea College in the autumn of
1892, it was clear that the College was far from prosperous.
President Fairchild had been in failing health during the two
years before his death, and his successor, the Reverend William
B. Stewart, had for two years devoted his attention to teaching
rather than to raising money. President Frost, then in his
thirty-eighth year, was unwilling to accept the status quo as
inevitable.

When he looked over the enrollment figures of the preced-
ing year, 1891-1892, President Frost saw that there had been
thirty-one students in the College Department, twenty-two
Negroes and nine whites. Aside from the white students whose
parents lived in Berea, there were very few mountain students
enrolled in the institution as a whole, though President Fair-
child had taken so profound an interest in their welfare. 20 The
College graduates of the preceding Commencement, five Negro
men, greatly interested President Frost. Each of the two clas-
sical graduates had studied in Berea for eleven years; the three

48 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

scientific graduates had been in Berea from ten to thirteen
years, taking a term out now and then to earn money. One of
the five had enrolled in Oberlin Theological Seminary after his
graduation from Berea, and the other four had secured posi-
tions as principals of schools for Negroes in Kentucky munici-
palities. 21

At the close of his first year in Berea, June, 1893, President
Frost delivered to the trustees and faculty a scathing report, of
which he had only the milder portions printed. He spoke of
"the air of dilapidation about the place," the vacant rooms in
the dormitories, and the empty seats in the classes and the
Chapel. 22 In his report of June, 1894, he wrote: "Our success
in breaking down caste is measured by the number of white
students. . . . Our great work is to reconcile the two races, and
make friends for the colored among the white. To this end it
is very important that our colored students should be of a
superior quality. In this we are fortunate." 23 In his 1895 re-
port he wrote: "The people who contribute money to Berea
rather than to Hampton or Atlanta are interested in it as a
mixed school, and measure its success by the number of white
students." 24

President Frost increased the total enrollment by increasing
the number of white students, leaving the Negro numbers
about the same as before. Twelve years after his coming to
Berea the total registration was 961, of whom 157 were Negro,
in contrast to the total registration of 1893, which was 354, of
whom 184 were Negro students. The actual number of regis-
tered Negroes had decreased only 27, but the proportion of
Negroes to whites had fallen from 52 per cent to 16 per cent.
As Negroes formed about one-seventh of Kentucky's popula-
tion, this reduction seemed reasonable to President Frost and
others. They did not take into account the fact that this
change in ratio had caused the Negroes to become a minority
group on the campus.

In 1902 President Frost said to the faculty and trustees: "It
is no unimportant part of a white boy's education to see the

A Century of Interlace Education 49

Negro treated as a man. In the final account, Berea's work for
the abolition of caste may be the brightest jewel in her

crown/' 25 Because President Frost's mind was set upon in-
creasing the number of white students, he allowed himself to
be drawn into a bitter controversy in the state press, with
angry charges and countercharges regarding the future Negro
policy of the College. These sharp words tended to weaken
his influence among some of his most capable Negro graduates
when the crisis of hostile legislation overwhelmed the institu-
tion. The interracial truce crumbled under the Negroes' fear
that they would soon be excluded from Berea, judging from
President Frost's emphasis upon the education of mountain
people, who were white, and the steadily decreasing ratio of
Negroes to whites in the College.

SOON AFTER THE TURN of the century there were rumblings
that a segregation law might be passed to close Berea as a
mixed school. Already Kentucky had a segregation law apply-
ing to its public schools. 26 President Frost's anxiety on this mat-
ter led him in the fall of 1901 to correspond with several
friends in the East in regard to the danger of such legislation.
To a prominent Brooklyn minister he wrote:

"We feel that there is a conspiracy throughout the land to
defame the colored man and discourage his friends. Last year
the light of liberty went out in Tennessee when a law was
passed forbidding Maryville College to receive both white and
colored students. That college itself . . . turned over a portion
of its endowment to a neighboring colored school.

"This event happening so near us is occasioning a great
deal of 'talk' in Kentucky, and many people think a bill will be
introduced in our legislature to bring about the same result.
Now it is my judgment that we ought to fight such a law to the
very end. I do not see how we can possibly exist under it.

50 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Berea's foundation was laid and its chief endowment given by
people who understood and approved our position." 27

In correspondence with a Chicago friend President Frost
said that in case such a law were enacted and were upheld by
the courts, he could see nothing for Berea to do except to retire
temporarily to some point in Ohio or West Virginia and cany
on its work without its Berea properties. To President Frost's
suggestion that such a withdrawal would be in the line of
Berea's history, his friend replied that Berea's early history
afforded no parallel. "The persecuted workers withdrew, but
the school was not exiled." He suggested to the troubled presi-
dent that such a withdrawal might result in the loss of Berea's
charter and the extinction of Berea College. 28

The causes leading to the passage of a segregation law in
Kentucky in 1904 were diverse. The act was aimed directly at
Berea College, the only mixed college in the state at that time;
but it was not passed because of any interracial misconduct in
the College. The causes were certain regional, local, and per-
sonal factors that were distorted by a political or social bias.
An anti-Negro wave of feeling that was sweeping over the
South had already caused stricter registration laws and a poll-
tax requirement for voting to be passed in some southern states,
though not in Kentucky, and had showed itself in Kentucky by
the passage of a separate coach law. There were Bourbon
politicians outside the state who said that a thoroughgoing
segregation law in Kentucky might help to make the South
more "solid." 29

Though very few Negroes lived in the mountain counties,
enough anti-Negro feeling was in the air to lead some mountain
politicians to think that a vote for a piece of anti-Negro legisla-
tion would bolster up their election record in the home pre-
cincts, and that a vote against such a law would ruin their
political careers forever. 30 There were mountain families who
would not send their sons and daughters to Berea because it
was a mixed school. Now that Berea College had become a
prosperous and well-known school, they were sorry indeed that

A Century of Interlace Education 51

It was spoiled for them by having Negroes among its numbers.
There was a fast-growing prosperity in the little town of
Berea, and It led some of the white businessmen to regret that
so many good lots on the Ridge were owned by Negro families.
Business was booming in Berea with the coming of a new bank,
a stave mill that worked ten men, a long-distance telephone, an
oil boom, and the opening of coal mines at Big Hill. These
visible marks of progress led to a hopeful feeling that with lily-
whiteness on the Ridge more mountain students would come
to Berea College and business might become even better than
at present. A few of these men lent their support to the passage
of legislation hostile to mixed education in Berea.

VII

ON JANUARY 12, 1904, Representative Carl Day (D) of Breath-
itt County in the heart of the Kentucky mountains introduced
a segregation bill into the House of Representatives of the
Kentucky General Assembly. This House bill no. 25 was sent
to the Committees on Education, which held separate hear-
ings of those favoring and those opposing the bill. Representa-
tive Day told the press that he had introduced the measure
for the purpose of preventing the contamination of the white
children of Kentucky.

The bill In its final form declared it "unlawful for any per-
son, corporation, or association of persons to maintain or operate
any college, school, or institution where persons of the white
and Negro races are both received as pupils for Instruction."
No previous Kentucky law had specified penalties for non-
segregation in schools, but this bill stated that the penalties for
violation were to be as follows: upon the institution, $1,000;
upon the teacher, $50; and upon the student, whether Negro
or white, $50 for each day's violation of the law. It applied to
any private school that maintained any interracial branch with-
in a radius of twenty-five miles. 31

52 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

Race feeling rather than party affiliation determined the
vote in each house of the General Assembly, and a nasty smear
of insinuations about life on the Berea campus immediately
aggravated traditional attitudes and political fears. The re-
monstrance sent by the Berea faculty and the paper of protest
signed by many townspeople against the bill were of no avail.
President Frost delivered a thought-provoking address to the
Senate Committee on Education, including certain words for
those who based their defense of the Day bill upon their de-
sire to preserve the white race from contamination: "We be-
lieve that today there is less race contamination in the sphere
of Berea's influence than anywhere else in the State. . . . The
Berea way of preventing the mingling of the races is not by
repressing the Negro and calling him by humiliating names,
but we put such character and self-respect into the Negro that
he keeps himself in order." 32

During this stormy session of the General Assembly, Presi-
dent Frost preached in Berea a noteworthy sermon which
showed the meaning of the Berea spirit. His text was: "Re-
member them that are in bonds," Hebrews 13:3. He appealed
to his white and Negro audience to remember in a spirit of
love those that were in bonds put upon them long ago by
slavery Negroes with their bonds of ignorance and shiftless -
ness, and white men with their bond of caste prejudice. "How
long must it take the white and the black to cast off the bonds
which the great curse of human slavery has left upon them?" 33

When House bill no. 25 had been passed into law on March
12, 1904, the Berea Board of Trustees voted to test the con-
stitutionality of the law in the Kentucky courts. The College's
lawyers took the stand that this state law was a violation of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,
which prohibited any state from abridging the privileges and
immunities of the citizens of the United States. The case was
not a Negro case at all, according to this reasoning, but a case
involving the rights of colleges and persons, regardless of race.
In the Circuit Court, Judge James M. Benton's decision was

A Century of Interlace Education 53

that the legislature was within its powers in providing for the
exercise of that police power which has always been regarded
as proper when the situation demands it; and that in this case
the racial situation was such that the state should prevent the
coeducation of the races. The case was then taken to the Ken-
tucky Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court's de-
cision for the most part, but declared the twenty-five mile
clause tyrannical and void. 34

Berea College then appealed the case to the United States
Supreme Court, which rendered its decision on November 9,
1908, four and one-half years after the Day law was passed by
the Kentucky legislature. It simply affirmed the previous judg-
ment : "The right to teach white and Negro children in a pri-
vate school at the same time is not a property right. Besides,
appellant Berea College as a corporation created by this State
had no natural right to teach at all. Its right to teach is such as
the State sees fit to give it. The State may withhold it alto-
gether or qualify it." 35

The College did not sit with folded hands while lawyers and
judges pondered over legal technicalities. It announced that it
could receive no Negro students until the constitutionality of
the law had been tested in the courts. The trustees, no longer
a local group, realized that President Frost's impulsive wish to
move temporarily to the North involved the risk of losing
Berea's charter. Some trustees favored the idea of making
Berea College into a Negro school, while others preferred the
plan of making Berea a white institution. The donors, too, were
divided on this delicate subject. As a result of conflicting views
the trustees took one cautious step at a time, and their decisions
were not those of any one man on the Board, not even of
President Frost.

The trustees' committee issued a printed statement express-
ing their sympathy with the Negro students "in this hour of
their trial and ours. We and they are sufferers together. . . . We
will seek to help them in all legitimate ways to continue their
education in the best available methods until a final decision

54 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

is rendered by the highest court/' To help them in this emer-
gency, the College would provide education in other good in-
stitutions and would make up to those students the difference
in their railroad fare and in living expenses, so as to relieve
them from financial loss by reason of the change. In the first
year of the trustees' offer, 1904-1905, fifty-two of the more ad-
vanced Negro students attended such schools as Fisk, Tuskegee,
Knoxville, and Kentucky State Institute for Negroes. It was a
dramatic occasion when two Negro students who had finished
the scientific course at Fisk University in June, 1905, returned
"home" to deliver their graduating orations in Berea's Taber-
nacle on Commencement Day after the white exercises were
over. 36 Each year until 1911 the trustees voted this aid to their
former Negro students and a few additional Negroes of special
promise; and the names of those accepting the offer were listed
in the Berea catalog as "Berea College Students at Other In-
stitutions." The numerous letters received by the College from
these students in absentia show how great was their apprecia-
tion of their Alma Mater's care for them.

VIII

AFTEK THE KENTUCKY Court of Appeals in 1906 upheld the
legality of the Day lav/, the Berea trustees planned the estab-
lishment of a new Negro school or department. To some
trustees and friends this action seemed like a disloyal retreat
from the principle of interracial education; to others it savored
of scorn for Negro rights. The trustee committee on care of the
Negro people called attention to several important factors
that influenced their decision to set up a good Negro school
separate from Berea College; namely, that the Negroes seemed
to be impressed by the success of such segregated schools as
Fisk, Hampton, and Tuskegee, and that many of them ex-
pressed themselves as preferring schools for their own race.
Believing that the Negroes had an equity both in the funds of

A Century of Interlace Education 55

the College and in the love and care of its trustees and workers,
the committee recommended that the trustees undertake to
raise a fund large enough to represent the Negro people's
equity in the present college holdings and commensurate with
their needs. 37

The next task of the trustee committee was to determine in
dollars the amount of the special fund to be raised for the Negro
institution. The money given to Berea College in the past
specifically for Negro education amounted to about $28,000.
It was impossible to estimate how much was meant for Negro
use in grants made by friends of the Negro people without
definite designation of its purpose. Some other formula must
be used.

Before 1892 the Negroes had constituted about half of the
enrollment. If one assumed that they were entitled to half
the property of the College in 1892, they would be entitled to
a credit of $100,000. In the last school year before the Day law
was passed, the Negroes numbered 157 to the whites' 804. If
the property acquired by the College between 1892 and 1904
were divided on the basis of this enrollment, the Negroes would
be entitled to about two-elevenths of this property, that is,
$100,000. President Frost insisted, however, that $200,000 was
not enough for setting up a worthy school, and so another
$200,000 should be added. Since he would bear the burden
of raising this sum, the trustees authorized the larger amount.
Berea College would sequestrate $200,000 of her fixed property
for the Negro school, and this loss to the white people would
be replaced by that amount from the Adjustment Fund. 38
Within a year this $200,000 for replacement came from a single
source, Andrew Carnegie.

Little by little other pledges were secured. In the fall of
1908 a donor offered $50,000 on condition that the people of
Kentucky give the same amount. It was decided to raise part
of Kentucky's share among the Negro people of the state, since
they would benefit most from the fund. Two Negro alumni,
Dr. James Bond and Principal Kirke Smith, did most of the

56 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

work in raising this money among the Negroes. Altogether
about 4,000 Negroes made subscriptions, which ranged from
fifty cents to two hundred dollars, and amounted in all to
$19,000. With the raising of Kentucky's share the Adjustment
Fund was completed by July 1, 1909. 39

From the time the Day bill was introduced into the House
in 1904, there had been persistent whispers that President
Frost would be altogether willing that the bill should pass,
thus painlessly eliminating Negroes from the Berea school and
increasing the number of mountain students willing to come.
The president was aware of this sinister talk and repeatedly
denied that it had any foundation in fact; but still it persisted.
He was cut to the quick by the insulting words of a vocal
minority, both Negro and white. The good news of Carnegie's
grant of $200,000 to the Fund overwhelmed the Negroes living
near enough Berea to know President Frost, and they held sev-
eral praise meetings in Negro churches and schools to thank
Carnegie, President Frost, and Berea College for their help.
Letters were read from former students, old-time hymns were
sung, and soul-stirring testimonies were given, such as, "I thank
God for President Frost and for all the white people, for they
all help us," and "All I am and hope to be I owe to Berea
College." A meeting, with supper served by the women, was
held in the Berea Negro schoolhouse in March. After many
short speeches were made, President Frost explained why
progress had been slow and asked for the prayers of all in his
hard task of keeping one college going while starting another.
He closed by revealing his heart to his Negro friends, saying
in broken voice that he would be glad of the Judgment Day
because then his heart could be seen and would give the lie
to men who said that he was unfriendly to the Negro people. 40

It was finally decided that the new Negro school should be
an independent institution, not a department of Berea College,
and that it should be of the Hampton type, emphasizing normal
and industrial work at first, and adding college work when the
situation should so demand. It was hard to find a site for it,

A Century of Interlace Education 57

but at length some 450 acres of good farm land were bought
about twenty-one miles east of Louisville. The new institution,

incorporated in January, 1910, was called Lincoln Institute, and
its large administration building, the cornerstone of which was
laid in November, 1911, was called Berea Hall. Lincoln In-
stitute had its own Board of Trustees, its own president, the
Reverend A. E. Thomson, its own donors, and its own funds. 41
After its incorporation in 1910 its history ceased to be a part of
Berea's history.

IX

THE SEGREGATION LAW forced upon Berea College halfway
through its first century created the most severe crisis in Berea's
history. Even the best friends of the College held diverse
opinions as to the wisest and most honorable course to follow.
To many men the crisis seemed to have passed when the Ad-
justment Fund was raised for Lincoln Institute; but thoughtful
men would continue to question Berea's sincerity if the institu-
tion could lightly turn its back upon a half century of inter-
racial concern. From the days of Fee and Rogers, Berea's
voice had said plainly that it was good for white and Negro
youth in their college years to share their problems, their
hopes, and their gifts, respecting the humanity of one another.
The testing of Berea continued in the forty years following the
Supreme Court's decision upholding the Day law.

Berea's interracial policy in the Fairchild administration
had been based upon the idea that true education lies less in
indoctrination than in providing rich experiences through which
students could discover challenging causes and enduring values.
Although under the Day law the enriching experience of inter-
racial classrooms was forbidden, lawful ways were soon dis-
covered by which the College might in a certain sense live
above segregation. One of these ways was to bring to the col-
lege audience outstanding Negro speakers and musicians, so
that students might learn how good the Negro "best" really

58 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

was. President Frost was too deeply concerned with great
financial and building plans to cany out this idea in a large
way, but during the administration of President William J.
Hutchins (1920-1939), Berea students each year heard at least
one important Negro speaker or group of musicians. In this
administration, the students heard Dr. George Washington
Carver, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Professor Alain Locke, Dean
Howard Thumian, Principal Wallace Battle, and other im-
portant Negro leaders of thought. Perhaps the deepest im-
pression was made by James Weldon Johnson in the college
Chapel. The house was filled with an expectant audience.
Quietly in his beautiful English the poet spoke of some Negro
contributions to American culture, and they listened with re-
spect and interest. Then he began to speak in a more intimate
medium, "Listen, Lord/' and "Creation." The young listeners
saw God there on Creation Day, God looking at his sun, his
moon, and his little stars. The boys drank in his words as
though they were alone with him in a mountain cove. They
saw God scooping the clay from the bed of his river and toiling
over man's crude form to the last amen. Then the poet held
them in the hollow of his hand with "Go down, Death," and
'"Crucifixion," and after that they belonged to him forever. The
notebooks in their hands were left blank, for that day's lesson
was written upon each soul.

Since 1940 Berea College has taken another step in inter-
racial understanding. Berea students have had the opportunity
to share in interracial conferences on their own campus, meet-
ing Negro students from other colleges in round-table discus-
sions. Mrs. Charles S. Johnson in opening one such conference
expressed in a single telling sentence the spirit of these meet-
ings : "I assume that we meet on the ground of a common con-
cern." 42

In recent years Berea College has publicly honored some
of its Negro alumni distinguished for outstanding public serv-
ice. In 1932 the College granted the degree of Doctor of
Literature to Wallace Battle, an alumnus of the class of 1901,

A Century of Interlace Education 59

the founder and for twenty-five years the president of Okolona
Industrial College: "Educator and advocate of the colored race,
leader of Ms people from servitude to the service which is
perfect freedom/' At Commencement, 1944., a citation of honor
was given to John W. Bate of Danville, Kentucky. The veteran
educator was presented to President Francis S. Hutchins in
words that immediately captured the audience, most of whom
had never before seen an ex-slave and had only the faintest
idea of what a little slave boy could do with his freedom:
"Born in slavery, December 22, 1854; plunged into unspeak-
able poverty by emancipation; member of a despised race;
caught the vision of complete living and rich service through
education; laid his foundations for education in mission schools
of Louisville; entered Berea as a student at the age of sixteen;
received from Berea the A.B. degree in 1891, and an honorary
A.M. degree in 1896; studied in Germany. By his unimpeach-
able character, vital interest in the community, and achieve-
ment, he has won the signal honor of First Citizen of Danville,
to whom the citizens affectionately refer as OUR OWN BOOKER T.
WASHINGTON." 43 President Hutchins then awarded Professor
Bate the citation of honor, reading these words as well as
others from the citation: "For six decades the leader of a school
in the city of Danvillea school which grew from one teacher
to fifteen, from six students to six hundred, ... a son who has
treasured and practiced the finest teaching of this College."
Professor Bate's presence and his affecting reminiscences dur-
ing this visit revived the memory of Berea's heroic past, from
which the Day law was powerless to segregate the Berea of
1944.

Another means through which Negroes and whites were
helped into a better understanding was the Middletown Con-
solidated School established in 1927 about one mile north of
Berea. A $12,000 brick building was erected by the county
with the help of a $1,000 grant from the Julius Rosenwald
Fund. Berea College gave four acres of land for this elementary
school, and extended its water and electric lines out to the

60 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

building. At its dedication the president of Berea College,
after speaking about the ugliness of race hatred, showed how
this school might become a bridge for all who came there. 44
The College, it is true, has helped this school, but the Middle-
town School in its turn has been of great help to Berea students.
Robert Blythe, the principal of this school for twenty-eight
years, has co-operated with the College in providing valuable
experience in race relations to white students. The College
Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. help in the school's recreation pro-
gram. College classes in social case work have been able to
include Negro families in their studies through Principal
Blythe ? s aid. Students in Bible and in social problems have
presented programs to the school, and student groups have
been welcomed by the Negro teachers to help in preparing for
the Christmas and other entertainments.

THE DOOR THAT HAD been closed in 1904 to Negroes wishing
to study in Berea was opened again in 1950. In 1949 a federal
district judge ordered the University of Kentucky to admit
Negro students to its graduate schools, since segregated edu-
cation was not "equal" education. Then at its next session,
1950, the legislature of Kentucky amended the Day law so as
to allow the coeducation of white and Negro students in pub-
lic or private schools above the high school level, "provided the
governing authorities of the institution, corporation, group or
body so elect, and provided that an equal, complete and ac-
credited course is not available at the Kentucky State College
for Negroes." 45

In their April meeting, 1950, the trustees of Berea College
reaffirmed Berea's dedication to the youth of the Appalachian
mountain region "to which we have tried to minister for nearly
a century," and after expressing Berea's "interest in the efforts
of Negro youth of this region to secure an education/' they

A Century of Intenace Education 61

empowered the administration "to admit such Negro students
from within this mountain region whom it finds thoroughly
qualified, coming completely within provisions of the Ken-
tucky law, and whom in its judgment it appears we should

serve." 46

By this action Berea has remained an institution especially
devoted to the mountain people. The Negro candidates for
admission are expected to present the same character and
scholastic qualifications as the whites. In 1950 three Negro
students were admitted to the College; in 1951, eleven; in 1952
and 1953, twelve each year; and in 1954, sixteen. The small
number of Negro admissions since 1950 is explained by: the
small number of Negroes resident in the southern mountains;
the poorer educational opportunities for Negroes in elementary
and secondary work; and Berea's policy of admitting Negro
applicants most likely to do college work well. Another factor
that probably has helped in the new adjustment has been the
presence upon the campus of an unusual number of students
from the Orient who are somewhat different in complexion and
features from Americans of west-European ancestry.

After Negroes had been admitted in 1950, they were wel-
comed into campus organizations according to their gifts and
tastes. One played in the students' "royal collegians"; another
sang in the varsity women's glee club. Several sang in the
chapel choir. One man played on the varsity basketball team.,
and another was a member of the track team. Negroes also
were chosen to carry responsibilities. One of the leading parts
in a major spring production of the dramatic club was taken
successfully by a Negro, and another Negro girl was chosen
president of the women's association. In 1953 a Negro girl
was selected to give the address on an all-student Thanksgiving
program, and one was named for Who's Who in American Col-
leges and Universities by vote of upper-class students and
faculty. In 1954 a Negro girl, admitted to Berea's School of
Nursing, was awarded a four-year scholarship of $200 a year
by the national board of the Daughters of the American Revolu-

62 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

tion in order that she might fulfill her desire to become a public
health nurse among her people in eastern Kentucky. 47

Berea College in its century of interrace experience has not
disproved either the existence or the strength of race prejudice;
but it has illustrated some ways in which traditional inocula-
tion can be overcome by men and women of good will, closely
knit into an interracial college community where there is co-
ordination of study, labor, recreation, and social service, ac-
companied by a patient confidence that time is of the essence
in working out problems of human relations.

CHAPTER

: The Mountain
Field

THE FIRST Constitution of Berea College, as has been said,
stated no preference for any one race of students, nor did it
mention any region which would receive Berea's special care.
At the close of the Civil War, however, the first Berea catalog
(1867) mentioned two groups of people who were in need of
Berea's educational offerings: (1) the recently emancipated
Negroes; (2) "the white people of eastern Kentucky and similar
regions in adjoining States." The Negroes were so few in num-
ber in the mountain counties that to speak of mountain people
meant to speak of whites. The preceding chapter has con-
sidered Berea's experience in Negro education. The present
chapter will deal with the mountain area as a field of work,
the growth of interest in the mountain people's nature and
needs, the rivalry that eventually sprang up between Berea's
two fields of concern, and after Negro exclusion, the use of a
quota to protect the mountain people from other white ap-
plicants who were less in need of Berea*s improved facilities
than were the people in the mountain counties, so that today
about 90 per cent of the students attending Berea College come
from 230 counties in eight states which lie in the southern
Appalachian area.

64 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

ii

CASSIUS M. CLAY, though opposed to the institution of slavery,
was primarily interested in the white man's freedom, and he
bestowed his favors upon the Berea community because it
would strengthen the nonslaveholder's position. Later in life
he frankly said that helping the Berea cause "served a great
purpose" in his political career. 1

Before the Civil War, John G. Fee as a thoroughgoing
abolitionist worked against the institution of slavery, and his
experience with emancipated Negroes at Camp Nelson turned
his thoughts strongly toward plans for educating them after
war had ended. Ultimately Negro education became almost
as consuming an interest to him as the abolition of slavery had
been in antebellum days. Therefore he tended to devote him-
self more fully to the Negro than to the mountain students.

Fee and Clay were Kentuckians, and knew much more
about the mountain people than did Rogers, who had been
reared in Connecticut; but Rogers was determined to become
better acquainted with his new field of work. In the summer
of 1858 soon after his first term of school on the Ridge had
closed, he set out upon a mountain trip by horseback with Fee.
Today we might say that he did not go very deeply into Ken-
tucky's hill country, as his journey took him from Berea through
Rockcastle, Pulaski, and McCreary counties, and back through
Laurel and Jackson; yet it was an eye-opening experience to
him, and upon his return he at once wrote four articles about
what he had seen. These were published in the Independent
(New York) in the fall of 1858.

Rogers saw things with a teacher's eye, and he wrote down
his impressions so soon that they did not become colored by
time's fantasy. He remarked that in mountain schools the poor
equipment, "seats made of rails and slabs, few books/ 7 was less
distressing to him than the poor training of the teacher, who
was usually a very poor reader. He saw "many scholars who

The Mountain Field 65

went out and came in as they pleased/' and a teacher with his
heels on a desk. "Before I left, he commanded his scholars to
study; thereupon the members of the school set their lungs as
well as their eyes to work. Spelling, which with reading and
writing not unusually comprises the whole course of study, was
the order for an hour. A roar ensued, not unlike that of a pack
of artillery. The air seemed filled with splinters of words and
syllables." 2

In speaking of religion in the hill country he said: "Chris-
tianity has sunk to a mere formalism on the part of some, and is
supposed by others to consist in ebullitions of feeling." As to
homes he wrote: "Though travelling over productive lands,
which in a wild state can be bought at prices varying from one
to five dollars per acre, you will rarely see any other than a log
house frequently not for thirty miles. The use of glass in some
localities is scarcely known. . . . Corn meal, coffee, and bacon
are the universal articles of diet, and many families rarely taste
anything else." As to the origin of the people his words were:
"The inhabitants are the descendents of the early settlers of
Virginia and North Carolina, and not a few of them are of
houses of note." When he turned to the individual mountaineer
he said: "One of the first mountain men I saw was in form,
feature, and bearing a perfect facsimile of a Spanish cavalier
of the olden time. The degree of admiration I felt for him was
lessened when I visited his cheerless cabin, occupied by a
numerous family, alike devoid of knowledge and comforts." 3
At Cumberland Falls he was impressed by the amount of un-
used water power: "There is scarcely a house within a hundred
miles of the Falls in which there is not a loom; and here is a
power sufficient to drive a thousand of them but unused." 4
These articles written by Rogers in 1858 form a coherent state-
ment of mountain life at the beginning of Berea's history.

In 1869 Rogers in speaking of mountain students who were
registering in the newly opened College remarked that many
of them were Union veterans "whose ideas had been enlarged
and energies developed by the War," so that they were seeking

66 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

an education. He remarked that some of them had had to en-
dure great reproach from their relatives and companions be-
cause of going to an institution admitting Negroes. "Three
years ago it required a degree of moral courage for a young
white man to connect himself with the institution quite as
great as for Luther to go to the Diet of Worms. And although
three years have made astonishing changes in this respect,
there are many who secretly long to be at Berea, who cannot
endure the scorn that would be heaped upon them, if they
should enter an institution very unpopular with many." 5

in

THOUGH PRESIDENT Fairchild in his earlier years had been a
strong worker against slavery and though as president of Berea
College he gave loving care to his Negro students, he paid an
increasing measure of attention to the people of the hills. In
1873 he published an article about the fine mountain families
who were preparing to move to Berea to enjoy its educational
advantages. 6 In his book (1875) introducing Berea College
he devoted seven pages to the educational famine among the
mountain people, calling attention to their high rate of illiter-
acy, their poor schoolhouses sometimes without floors or even
a door, and their lack of schoolbooks; and said that the best
means of raising the standard was "to induce many of their
most promising young men and women to go to some good
school and fit themselves for teachers." 7 In 1882 he issued a
donors' folder containing an article on the social needs of the
mountain people, "The Other Folk of Kentucky," by Dr. A. D.
Mayo of Washington, D. C.

Charles G. Fairchild, professor of science in Berea College
and eldest son of its president, in 1883 wrote an account of
rural life in the Kentucky hills as he had seen it: "They are an
agricultural people, . . . the homestead often having been
handed down through two or three generations. . . . Often a

The Mountain Field 67

family will not see $50 in cash the year round. Even the old
hand looms find friendly shelter in those Rip Van Winkle hol-
lows. A man that moved from these regions to Berea that he
might give Ms children an education, wore upon his back his
carefully preserved wedding suit, the wool for which he him-
self had cut from the backs of his father's sheep. ... A little
shovel, a handmade hoe, and an unkempt mule with a straw
collar make up the agricultural outfit. . . . More than half of
the adult wiiite population native bom, of the same stock and
lineage that furnished from the more favored sections the Clays
and BrecMnridges, that gave to this country Abraham Lincoln
more than half of this white population cannot read or
write/' 8

The most interesting expression of President Fairchild's
concern over mountain backwardness was his baccalaureate
sermon of 1881, where he laid before his students the improve-
ments which he would expect them to make in the mountain
communities where they would serve as district schoolteachers.
This long-range plan for the betterment of superrural mountain
life was in a sense an outline that forecast Berea's program for
the next fifty years.

1. Improvement in housing. "The log huts without win-
dows and with one or two rooms, must give place to neatly
painted and glazed dwellings surrounded by neat fences and
beautiful yards, and with fine orchards and vineyards."

2. Ceiled and painted schoolhouses provided with desks,
windows, and stoves.

3. A supply of books and papers in each home and in Sun-
day school and district school libraries.

4. A public school fund four or five times as large as at
that time.

5. "Comfortable free roads in every direction through the
mountains.'*

6. Preaching and Sunday school every week conducted by
ministers who could devote their entire time to spiritual and
educational work instead of doing manual work for a living.

68 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

IV

PRESIDENT FROST'S emphasis upon the mountain field grew
rapidly in the early years of his administration. In July, 1892,
while considering Berea's second invitation to him to accept
the presidency of Berea College, he wrote from Goettingen a
long letter in regard to his understanding of Berea's work: "The
peculiar work of Berea for years to come, that which secures
for her the support of men and the blessing of heaven, is for
the colored race." 9 After his retirement from the presidency
this grandson of the abolitionist William Goodeli wrote that
he was not sure that he would ever have come to Berea "if it
had not been for my ancestral and personal interest in be-
friending the colored race." 10 In his inaugural address, 1893,
the nearest approach he made to the mountain field was to say:
"Our cities may be purified by air from these Cumberland
Mountains," and about the same time in his first annual report
he wrote: "So too, the mountain whites belong to Berea. We
are under the impression that Berea discovered them. But it
is not Berea which is educating the mountain whites today.
We can hardly count up two score mountain whites in all the
school."

In the summer following his inauguration (1893), President
Frost spent several weeks traveling horseback in Jackson and
Owsley counties with Frank Hays, a mountain veteran who had
moved from Jackson County to Berea for his children's sake.
Each schoolday President Frost would speak in three school-
houses, and then at night he would speak to parents on the
value of education. When the day was done, Hays would
answer the president's questions and would put his finger on
the president's words that might offend his audience. On Satur-
day and Sunday, President Frost would preach, and again his
monitor would work upon him. After a few weeks of such
training President Frost ceased to use the opprobrious term
"mountain whites," and out of his increasing respect for the

The Mountain Field 69

mountain people lie began to show an unusual interest in
mountain students and their homes.

Already before coming to Berea College as its president, he
had suggested a plan for the recovery of Berea's institutional
health: that the number of students should be increased and
the quality of instruction improved. He suggested that if a
considerable number of students from northern states were
drawn to register in Berea College, an increase of "white stu-
dents from the South" would soon follow. During his first year
in Berea he corresponded with the Reverend William E. Bar-
ton, a Berea College alumnus of 1885 who held a pastorate in
Ohio, and through Barton's help secured twenty-six northern
students to enter Berea College in the fall of 1893. "A pitifully
small return for all our effort," wrote Barton; but the northern
students excelled in effort and ability, and their example led
other Ohio students to apply for admission long after Barton
had taken a Boston church. 11

In February, 1894, President Frost wrote one of the most
significant documents of his entire administration, a paper
which shows how far he had traveled in a year and a half of
thinking over the mountain field. He admitted that Berea had
lost its white students except the children of the village, and
was ready to give up its College Department and become
simply a Negro school like Camp Nelson. Now he outlined to
the faculty the three steps by which Berea might retrieve this
defeat, steps which had been vaguely in his mind when he
wrote from Goettingen and which had been clarified by his
month in the mountains.

1. Berea should continue to bring in white students from
the North. Barton's twenty-six good students from Ohio were
already on the campus.

2. Berea should use these white students year after year as
a means for recovering the white students from the mountains.
In ardent words so characteristic of this sanguine leader
President Frost wrote: "The presence of these northern whites
will enable us to reach the mountaineers and not only save

70 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

them from the contamination that is creeping in among them,
but actually bring them up as a re-enforcement to the moral
force of the nation/'

3. Berea College should create such enthusiasm and re-
forming zeal among its students, Negro and white, as would
make them forget their everyday hardships, "and fit them to
become recruiting officers for the College and exponents of
the Berea idea in the uttermost parts of the earth." This third
step, said President Frost, remained to be taken. Improve-
ment in scholarship and finances would be of little value until
the spirit of self-improvement and helpfulness to others was
infused into the hearts of Berea students. 12

President Frost had adopted the improvement of mountain
life through education as his life's cause a cause for donors,
for students, and for his faculty as opposition to slavery had
been his grandfather's cause. He showed his newborn love for
the mountain people in a tangible way in this February report
when he urged the faculty to use corn bread rather than white
bread and to give thought to building their new homes after
the mountain type "with the outside chimney, the charming
rafters, and the broad porch." In his June report to the faculty
in the same year (1894) he went so far as to say, "Our success
in breaking down caste is measured by the number of white
students/' On the same page he referred to the Negroes, but
in a sympathetic tone that might seem both patronizing and
irritating to a young Negro about to graduate from Berea Col-
lege: "Our colored students for whose sake we are undertaking
the great burden of obloquy and opposition, constitute a fine
body of young people/' 13

When speaking to a teachers' convention in Cincinnati,,
Ohio, a year after this time, he reflected the joy that he felt
in his new-found cause: "I am here to announce the discovery
of a new world, or at least a new grand subdivision. Have you
ever heard of Appalachian America? Just as our western fron-
tier has been lost in the Pacific Ocean, we have discovered a
new pioneer region in the mountains of the central South/' 14

The Mountain Field 71

In the same year ( 1895) it became clear that he had introduced
his new cause to prospective donors, for Dr. D. K. Pearsons of
Chicago, in making his pledge of $50,000 for endowment pro-
vided the College would match it by raising $150,000 of new
endowment funds, closed his offer with these words: "I make
this gift to all humanity, and especially to the loyal people of
these mountains." 15

Before the Day law, passed in 1904, diverted his attention,
President Frost aroused great interest in the mountain cause
by writing a number of articles on the mountain people for
outstanding magazines: Ladies' Home Companion, September,
1896; Outlook, September 3, 1898; Atlantic Monthly, March,
1899 (nine pages); American Monthly Review of Reviews,
March, 1900; and Missionary Review of the World, January,
1901 (eleven pages). In 1895 he established the Berea Quar-
terly, which continued until 1916 and ultimately constituted
a thesaurus of uncopyrighted mountain material available for
public use.

President Frost also captured public attention for Berea's
cause by notable meetings. The first of these was a dinner
meeting at the Thomdike Hotel in Boston, November, 1894,
which included among its speakers the distinguished Harvard
professor Dr. N. S. Shaler, who had been born in Kentucky
and had served there as state geologist from 1873 to 1880. This
was followed over the years by similar dinner meetings in New
York and Cincinnati as well as in Boston, each with an address
by President Frost and some notable guest speaker. After the
Negro exclusion issue had been adjusted, President Frost ar-
ranged a great meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, with the
former president of Columbia University, Seth Low, as chair-
man and with Governor Woodrow Wilson as the principal
speaker. In a letter from President Taft and a telegram from
Justice John M. Harlan of Kentucky that were read to the
audience before the addresses, emphasis was laid upon Berea's
mountain work, and Woodrow Wilson devoted his entire time
to the presentation of the southern mountain area as a frontier

72 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

region. In President Frost's last great meeting, held in Wash-
ington, D.C., in 1915, he spoke on "The Scotland of America"
and President Wilson spoke upon the general theme of Berea's
work for the mountains and thereby for the nation. These
meetings built up a new group of friends who took to their
hearts President Frost's cause, Appalachian America, as he
caled the mountain area.

In 1896 President Frost began to use in his publicity a small
map which showed very distinctly by hachures the southern
mountain region. Personally he had a strong antiquarian taste,
and he often indulged this taste to relieve the heaviness of his
serious words. He loved the quaint old English words and
phrases that he heard in his frequent journeys to the mountains.
Though he was not musical by nature, he grew to love the old
ballads that came from the hills. He loved the mountain
grease lamp as an Anglo-Saxon survival, and he drew his
breath in wonder at sight of a homemade wooden lock on a
mountain meathouse, the handiwork of some ingenious man
working in the old way. Out of his love for the mountain people
he began to call them by a phrase that came from his own
fertile mind, "our contemporary ancestors."

He was soon able to inspire some of Berea's most gifted
teachers with his new cause. In 1900 Silas C. Mason, professor
of forestry, wrote an excellent pamphlet for mountain people
on "Hints on how to get money to come to school." Miss
Josephine Robinson, professor of higher mathematics, took up
the task of buying and selling the mountain women's weavings,
although such handwork was entirely aside from her profes-
sional work. Principal Bruce Hunting before his death in 1898,
and two women who excelled in teacher training, Mrs. Daisy
Carlock (a sister of Elbert Hubbard) and Mrs. Eliza Yocum,
repeatedly traversed the mountain valleys to tell young teachers
what Berea College offered them.

By 1902 President Frost was able to say in his annual re-
port: "This College now stands before the public as the repre-
sentative school for the mountains, as Hampton and Tuskegee

The Mountain Field 73

stand as the representative institutions for the colored people/' 16
By this time Berea College as a whole had a student registra-
tion o more than eight hundred students; but President Frost's
cares extended far beyond the problem of increasing the num-
ber of mountain students. He must find more donors to finance
the buildings and the salaries of such an institution., and his
financing would be in vain if he did not adapt Berea's aca-
demic program to the needs of these students. He must de-
velop such a work program as would enable students without
money resources to make their way in school, and also he
must adapt Berea's men and resources to the solution of prob-
lems in the mountain area of eight states.

He knew that the mountain problems were too great for
one generation to solve, but he could never forget the illiteracy
that made life dull, the isolation that bred feuds, the ignorance
that made life harder than it need have been, and the poor
teaching that handicapped every mountain child. Although he
sometimes waxed sentimental over the log cabins and the spin-
ning wheel, more often he was grim at thought of the bareness
of the mountain man's inner life.

For five years after the Day law was passed, President Frost
devoted most of his time to the Negroes' cause, but finally in
1909 he was able to return to his main concern, writing in his
annual report of that year: "The mountain work, the field of
Berea's discovery and devotion, now claims our full attention.
. . . The changes of new life are knocking at every door. The
mountain people will be quickly spoiled and lost if they are
not befriended, guided, and saved." When he returned at
last to the mountain work, he had to limit his activity to a
greatly reduced time schedule. The last decade of his adminis-
tration was marked by a constant struggle to surmount the
nervous exhaustion resulting from his years of overwork. The
wonder is that one man could have accomplished as much as
President Frost did accomplish.

He learned about mountain life from scholars, from statis-
tical tables, from faculty criticisms, from visits in the hills, and

74 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

from such intimate letters as those from which the following
excerpts were made in order to reveal his closeness to the hu-
man side of his "Cause."

The first was written by a mountain preacher on behalf
of his nineteen-year-old son: "How much money is it necessary
that he should get there with? We are very poor. I have a
little circuit that pays a little less than $200 per year. So far I
have received about $20 in money, and about $6 in other
articles, so I had to take my two sons from school and we have
all been working at the carpenters' trade. I would love so much
to send both my boys to Berea to school."

The second letter was written by a mountain boy from
South Carolina. He returned five dollars to President Frost, ex-
plaining: "When leaving Berea I received more money than
was coming to me. Now I have decided to lead a Christian
life, and I want to feel clear of everything I have done/'

The third letter was written by a girl from Breathitt County
in the Kentucky mountains: "Often while at work there at
home a longing would come into my heart for something that
I could not understand. I knew out beyond those hills was a
place where I could learn what that longing in my heart
meant. One day a man came to the log schoolhouse where I
had gone to school I never was the same after hearing him
speak. I realized that I was meant to do something, but I didn't
know what it was. I came to Berea to find my calling. That
old longing comes into my heart sometimes; then for a time
it's gone, but anyway it's still there."

PRESIDENT AND MRS. Frost had traveled together in the Ken-
tucky mountains many a season, but in the summer of 1914
Mrs. Frost went on a five-hundred mile journey on horseback
through the mountains without her husband, because by this
time he was unable to bear the strain of such a trip. As they

The Mountain Field 75

were about to enter into a campaign to raise a million dollars
for Berea's expansion, she felt their need to secure fresh in-
formation about Berea's impact upon mountain life. That she
was fifty-one years old meant little to her. She took along her
young son Cleveland, who was eighteen and a good hand with
horses. She was an ageless kind of woman, sensitive and per-
ceptive.

Their first three weeks were spent in Owsley County, where
Berea's influence had been strong for many years. They rode
by way of the creeks, since the county had as yet neither a
railroad nor a hard-surfaced road, and followed a penciled
"creek map" which an old settler had drawn for them. They
looked up some three hundred people from that county who
had attended school in Berea sometime in the past twenty
years, and stayed in the home of a Berea student every night
during the three weeks. Mrs. Frost visited at least one country
school a day, and each Saturday afternoon and Sunday at-
tended a country church service. What she learned in a school,
a church, or a home was beyond expression in figures, but it
gave her and her husband much to think about in the years
ahead. Owsley County's hospitality was so warm that she
wrote: "I registered a vow that when any of these old students
or their parents come to Berea, they shall stay at our house
even if the President of the United States has to be turned
away to make room for them." 17

When she attended a teachers' institute, she was glad to
hear the county superintendent, a former Berea student, give
a plain talk to fifteen school trustees, warning them that they
must not ask him to make it easy for their own sons to get a
teaching certificate, for he would be deaf to any such request. 18

From Owsley County Mrs. Frost rode through Clay and
Leslie counties, passing through heavily wooded lands, "log
cabin country," where she often found the schoolhouse shabby,
sometimes without steps or a well, often equipped with crude
benches and few desks; but she noticed when the floor was
freshly scrubbed and the teacher alert and sympathetic. She

76 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

wrote: "I left those shut-in valleys with a fresh gratitude for
the public school system. With all its imperfections, what a
power if we can only put a real teacher into each schoolroom!" 19

Because she had visited mountain schools before, she was
able to recognize relative progress, though she still saw too
many one-room schools with a teacher who had gone no further
than the eighth grade. While she was glad to see the new
graded schools that were being built, she could not put out of
her mind the idea that the one-room school in the secluded
ravine would remain the local school for many years to come,
since good roads were slow to come into the deep valleys of
mountain counties. The Normal dean at Berea, Dr. C. N.
McAllister, had been talking about the need for a one-room
practice school attended by rural children in a rural com-
munity. Now Mrs. Frost saw as never before the need for im-
proving the teachers who for many a year to come would go
into these one-room country schools.

She gave considerable thought to the mountain church, for
Berea is a Christian college which has a concern for a student's
understanding and practice of Christian ideas, regardless of
his religious denomination. In the back country she found, as
she had expected, preachers who made their living by farming,
storekeeping, or bothuneducated men who had had no chance
for an education, but men to be respected because they kept
alive in human hearts the love of God and respect for the Bible.
She found, as she had expected, the singing man, tuning fork
in hand, lining out each verse before the people sang; but then
at a funeral under the trees one day she heard the singing man
lead the people in a hymn which recalled the days of her own
childhood in Wisconsin, and when she reflected that there were
few hymnbooks available and that many persons at the funeral
could not read, the old-fashioned way seemed to her an alto-
gether natural custom.

She heard rhapsodic preaching, as had very many Berea
students of those days, and she heard the congregation respond
with deep sighs and amens. Then she wrote:

The Mountain Field 77

"The rhapsodic style of preaching has in it an element of
great value. It stands in their minds for what we mean when
we say of a preacher: "He is lost in his subject/ The man is
out of sight. In some way I would like to see it brought to
pass that our students, when they go home, should not go to
church and sit in the seat of the scornful. Let them take part
in the meetings, fall in with the lining of tunes when that is
the custom of the congregation. ... I would like to see our
men let themselves go, say with fervor the things they believe,
and let the grammar come as it will. When they are in accord
with what the preacher has said, let them express it." 20

When a controversy was impending at a long church service,
the issue being whether a man could be saved if he was not
elected to be saved, Mrs. Frost arose in her place, though a
stranger, and told of her own youthful doubts. She pointed to
the com growing close to the church: "Man's part and God's
part are in that crop. So it is with the spirit." The women
gathered around and followed her to dinner, where twenty
guests ate together. She wrote to her husband: ''After dinner
we talked religion all afternoon. A man said, 'People here are
starving for religion/ " 21

Mrs. Frost said that the most restful part of her trip was
calling on mountain mothers. Seldom in college history does a
president's wife come so close to students' mothers. She was
to them Berea College, and they felt free to ask her many
questions as they sat talking on a summer evening. That was
why she felt free to ask them why so many of their boys left
Berea before the term had ended. The mothers' most frequent
answer was "homesickness." A boy had been at the hospital
sick with the measles, and then he was released as well; but he
still felt very weak, and he thought of his mother at home.
His home might be a very small cabin, but his mother lived
in it, and she was the one who understood all about things,
even without his telling her in words. She knew that he was
sick in his heart, homesick. Sometimes he longed for the home
food at breakfast instead of the boarding hall's oatmeal, longed

78 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

for hot biscuit and ham gravy so much that he went home
never to coine back. Some people say that nowadays boys do
not go home for such trifling reasons, perhaps because the
world has invaded the mountains so deeply, or because today
more than 70 per cent of the students are pursuing a four-year
course for a college degree. The mothers admitted, too, that
sometimes the boys went home because they missed the fun
of getting logs off on the spring tide. Sometimes the very
thought of the piggies at home was too much for them, but
that only showed how much they loved the farm. Home was
home, and a mother understood all about such things.

Mrs. Frost learned that mountain women had their luxuries,
such as beautiful homespun, hand-woven coverlets that were
perfectly matched, soft homespun blankets, pieced quilts that
were like mosaics, and well-filled feather beds and pillows.
There might be a beautiful bureau in a house without a single
screened window or door. There might be a grandfather's
clock, brought over the mountains from Virginia in pioneer
days. No matter how poorly balanced the usual family diet
might be, they had their food luxuries, home-cured ham, honey
from the bee gums by the picket fence, goose plum preserves,
and blackberry stackpies one delicious pie upon another until
the pile three or four inches in height could be cut like a layer
cake.

In the mountains of Kentucky Mrs. Frost saw some large
houses that were well kept, and others that were dirty or
untidy, or both. The same might be said of the smaller houses
and the log cabins. Berea's voice seemed to her too weak on
the homemaking side. She wished to have a homemaking ex-
perience go with each diploma given to a Berea girl. The Col-
lege could fit up five old dwelling houses as model farm homes
with yards and chicken coops. She resolved that in the coin-
ing expansion campaign she would raise money with which to
establish a country home for each department, in order to
show how families could live well without even water works,
electric lights, or ice. Moreover, she resolved that courses in

The Mountain Field 79

home economics should be introduced into the College Depart-
ment's curriculum. These two ideas were finally carried into
execution, and in a modified form have remained a living part
of Berea College.

VI

THE TRUSTEES in 1911 added to the Constitution a brief state-
ment that recognized the southern mountain area as Berea's
special field. This statement, embedded in Article II, said that
Berea's aim in education was to be promoted "primarily by con-
tributing to the spiritual and material welfare of the mountain
region of the South." Nine years before this constitutional
change was made, President Frost in 1902 had expressed the
same idea when he spoke of "the Mountain Region, which is
Berea's peculiar field/' 22 and when he said: "Berea has a mission
of its own. . . . Our largest and most prominent work at present
is for the great mountain region of the South/' 23

In 1915 the Prudential Committee of Berea College, with
the approval of the trustees, took a step which really grew out
of the 1911 addition to the Constitution. This resolution pro-
vided "that no more students from outside the mountain region
as defined by the Russell Sage Foundation shall be admitted
except in rare and exceptional cases by permission of the Presi-
dent or the Registrar." It was also voted at this meeting that
waiting lists should be established when all available shelter
was occupied. The reason given for this first "out-of-territory"
restriction policy was that it seemed unfair to mountain stu-
dents that they should be crowded out to make room for stu-
dents from more favored parts of the country. 24

Although the new regulation was stated in the 1916 catalog,
no list of what were recognized as mountain counties appeared
until the catalog of 1917 listed 265 counties in the eight states
of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Car-
olina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. In 1919 a further
step was taken by inserting a ten-inch map showing the loca-

80 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

tion of the counties specified as mountain counties. From 1920
to 1925 no list nor county map of such counties was included
in the catalog; but beginning with the catalog of August, 1921,
a very small map of the mountain area was printed above the
interesting subscription: "The Field of Berea The Mountains
of the South/ 7 Since 1926 each catalog has carried a list of
mountain counties considered at that time in Berea's field, for
occasional changes are made, including dropping twenty-five
West Virginia counties from the Russell Sage Foundation's
map.

The Berea Wat/., a bulletin designed to introduce incoming
freshmen to student life at Berea College, in its 1954-1955
edition gave two pages to "The Field of Berea." Since some
nonmountain students were sure to be accepted, it was, of
course, important that they should feel themselves an integral
part of the college community and under no handicap because
of being nonmountain students. The paragraph preceding the
names of mountain counties speaks of the list as that "from
which students are given preference/' and adds the reassur-
ance: "However, students from outside this area will be given
careful consideration." On the opposite page is a map with
state lines indicated and Berea's mountain field clearly shown,
and the statement appended: "Over ninety per cent of Berea's
students come from 230 mountain counties of Southern Ap-
palachia."

Much thought has been given to the possible use of a quota
to restrict the admission of nonmountain students. In 1922 an
8 per cent quota was applied to nonmountain students below
College rank, but none to College students. By 1925 a College
quota of 25 per cent had been reduced to 15 per cent, and by
1937 the quota was fixed at 10 per cent for all departments.
The catalog of the year 1937 stated what has been the admis-
sion policy since that time: "Berea College exists primarily
for the people of the Southern mountains. ... In general not
more than 10 per cent of the students are accepted from out-
side this territory."

Tiie Mountain Field 81

The records o the registrar's office for 1953-1954 show 12.9
per cent nonmountain students in the total registration for
that year; 10.8 per cent in 1950-1951; 16.7 per cent in 1943-
1944; 7.8 per cent in 1940-1941; 9.9 per cent in 1933-1934. The
highest percentage of nonmountain students was 20.5 in the
troubled postwar year of 1946-1947; the lowest in the record
was 6.5 in 1927-1928. Once admitted, the origin of the non-
mountain student is forgotten unless he himself causes the
subject to be raised.

To recognize that Berea College draws about 90 per cent
of her students from this mountain area is important for the
functioning of her educational program., so that remedial work
may be provided early in a student's course if he needs it, that
students may be guided into course work in the social, eco-
nomic, and cultural problems of the mountains, and that moun-
tain students may be given encouragement to prepare for
leadership in fields that are especially in need of trained men
and women, such as agriculture, home economics, medicine,
and public service.

This devotion of Berea College to the welfare of the moun-
tain people has been followed by an unusual love of the moun-
tain people for Berea. A traveler through the mountains in
1922 wrote what has been expressed in substance many times
over: "My most profound impression was the universal con-
fidence of the people in Berea."

CHAPTER r*

j:
of

THE INSTITUTION that opened its crude door in 1855 to
the children around the Berea Eidge was legally a district
school; but in the minds of a few men it was a rudimentary
college. On January 4, 1856, John G. Fee wrote to Gerrit
Smith: "We have for months been talking about starting an
academy and eventually look to a college/' 1 Two weeks after
Professor Rogers* subscription school gave its closing entertain-
ment in June, 1858, John G. Fee wrote to a friend: "We think
the interests of truth and humanity now require a school of a
higher gradeone that shall prepare young men and young
ladies to go out as teachers; and as soon as possible, one that
shall confer degrees/' 2 Moreover, the institution for which Fee,
Rogers, Hanson, and others framed a constitution in the year
following this letter was to be a college that would furnish the
facilities for a thorough education, and Berea College still
makes this promise to its students and their parents.

These three elements were a part of the original warp of
Berea College, a college that would confer degrees at the close
of a thorough education; but there was a fourth element in
the prewar pattern. In the first Constitution of the College
( 1859 ) it was written that this education was to be Christian;

Changing Patterns of Education 83

and this thread, too, has remained a part of Berea's founda-
tion. Repeatedly Fee interpreted the meaning of the simple
words, "a Christian education/' as one that would teach not
merely the classics and the natural sciences, but also moral
science, "that science which teaches . . . the principles of love
in religion, and liberty and justice in government." 3

Berea College shows three distinct educational patterns
woven upon this original warp. The first was that which was
designed to meet the clamoring needs of newly emancipated
freedmen for whom the state had made little educational
preparation. The second pattern was that of practical educa-
tion for the plain people of the mountains "from the bottom
up," when President Frost turned the full energies of a revived
college to work upon mountain problems. The third pattern
was that which has been woven from the time of the demobili-
zation after World War I to the present, three and a half
decades in which the nation's unusual economic, social, and
religious unrest has shown the need for well-trained young
leaders in the mountain field, and far beyond it.

A very noticeable peculiarity of Berea College in the period
between 1866 and 1892 was that the College Department was
very small as compared with the rest of the institution, es-
pecially as compared with the elementary schools below the
Preparatory level, that is, Primary, Intermediate, and Grammar
School. The first College freshmen, five in number, were en-
rolled in 1869, when the total enrollment of the institution was
307; and the first College class, numbering three in a depart-
ment of nineteen, was graduated in 1873, when the total en-
rollment of the institution was 287. In 1880 out of a total of
309 students, 26 were in the College, 53 in the Preparatory De-
partment, and 230 in the elementary schools. In 1885 the total
enrollment was 312, but only 30 of these were College students.
In 1890 when the total enrollment was 355, only 28 were Col-
lege students. In but one year, 1879, did the College Depart-
ment number as many as 42. The pressing demand of Berea
in those days was for elementary education.

84 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

While Berea College took great pains to give the rudiments
of an education to those who had a poor start in life, it was
careful to see that the work of College students should be
mature and thorough. It is easy to understand why Angus
Burleigh in 1875 brought from the hills a cypress sapling and
planted it at Ladies' Hall as his graduation memorial, for he
was graduating from the classical course, 4 In those days the
College assumed that classical freshmen had already studied
beginning courses in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. The
school year was divided into three terms of twelve weeks each,
and a student took three (or occasionally four) courses each
term. The classical student must offer for graduation from Col-
lege six terms of Latin, nine terms of Greek, five terms of higher
mathematics, seven terms of science, six terms of philosophy,
two terms of history, one each of political science and of Eng-
lish literature, and a half term of rhetoric.

In 1874-1875 a two-year literary course was added to the
College offerings. It required no Greek, only three terms of
Latin, three terms of beginning French or German, and fewer
courses of science. This was later changed to a scientific course
of two years. In 1890-1891 between the scientific and the clas-
sical course a three-year philosophical course was arranged,
which added six terms of Greek and three terms of modern
language to the scientific course. The catalog of 1890-1891 an-
nounced that hereafter degrees would be given to the College
graduates as follows: Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Philosophy,
and Bachelor of Science. On the same page the catalog an-
nounced that the College by special action might grant a
Master's degree to certain graduates who for three or more
years had engaged in work which would greatly increase pro-
ficiency in their special field.

Before the College Department was organized, the catalog
bore on its outside cover the words "Berea Literary Institute,"
with an explanation on page 2 that this name was used "as more
in consonance with the present character of the school/' but
an announcement was made on the title page that this was

Changing Patterns of Education 85

"the first catalog of Berea College." When the College De-
partment was introduced in 1869 ? the term "Berea Literary
Institute" ceased to be used.

As there was a great need for district schoolteachers in the
early days of Berea College, a normal course for teacher train-
ing was set up in 1867 in the Preparatory Department. This
course, which was intended to be rigorous and thorough, in-
cluded four terms of Latin, six terms of mathematics (ending
with trigonometry), five terms of science (beginning with phy-
sical geography and ending with chemistry), as well as courses
in philosophy, history, English, and lectures on teaching. In
1879 a four-week course of "Practice in Teaching" was intro-
duced, but was soon replaced by pedagogical lectures. In 1883
a complete change in policy was announced for teacher train-
ing. Students who satisfactorily completed certain courses in
arithmetic, grammar, geography, physiology, English, book-
keeping, penmanship and algebra "would be given a certificate
of their attainments, recommending them to employers of
teachers as having completed an adequate Normal course." A
course of lectures on the theory and practice of teaching was
given for prospective teachers each spring; and as for observa-
tion, the catalog thereafter repeated year after year: "It is de-
signed that the management of daily classes shall furnish ex-
amples of correct and thorough instruction."

The elementary schools offered the customary instruction
in reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, penmanship, and ge-
ography, but the catalogs show no sign of an offer to train in
any industrial skills. The nearest approach to home economics
was the announcement in the catalogs of 1891 and 1892 that
"the young ladies received special instruction in the making
and repairing of garments," but this was as a convenience, not
a course.

During this period the administration was very simple. The
president was assisted in business matters by the Prudential
Committee. A professor acted as secretary and treasurer, be-
sides teaching. Another professor acted as principal of the

86 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

Preparatory Department, in addition to teaching. There was
no registrar, director of admissions, nor dean of labor. A pro-
fessor devoted part of his time to service as librarian.

The faculty consisted of the College professors, all of whom
were well-educated men with higher degrees. Sometimes they
invited the lady principal to be a member of their select body.
When Miss Kate Gilbert had taught French and German with
great success for ten years, they invited her to sit with them,
though she had no higher degree. Those who were not pro-
fessors were called teachers, and they were usually women who
taught in the elementary schools. They had teachers' meetings
of their own, but upon special occasions this Board of Teachers
was invited to sit with the faculty for at least part of an hour.
The Board of Trustees, of which John G. Fee was always chair-
man in this period, consisted of from ten to fourteen men, most
of whom were from Berea, or at least from Kentucky.

The faculty wrote annual reports to the president and the
trustees, and one of their most common concerns in these re-
ports was the small size of the College Department. In 1883
Professor W. E. C. Wright expressed the problem thus: "How
to make our advanced classes larger and how to secure more
students who will stay through the course." 5 President Fair-
child understood the reasons for the College situation, namely,
the students' lack of money and the low state of Kentucky's
common school education, which left them poorly fitted for
College work. 6

In 1884 the faculty presented a petition for three more pro-
fessors: a full-time professor of higher mathematics, to relieve
the Greek professor of having to use part of his time in teach-
ing mathematics; a full-time Latin professor, in order that the
College Latin might not have to be taught by the principal of
the Preparatory Department; and a second science professor,
preferably one who was an enthusiastic collector, who would
make and arrange collections in botany, zoology, mineralogy,
and geology, "such as shall make Berea College, as we hope to
see it, become the leading school of the region." 1 Eight years

Changing Patterns of Education 87

later their petition was still two-thirds unfulfilled, because the
institution could not afford to employ additional professors for
a College that had ceased to grow. In 1884 the College De-
partment had thirty-seven students, in 1891 thirty-one, and in
1892 again thirty-one students.

ii

PRESIDENT FROST was by nature a reformer, and his call to
Berea turned his crusading zeal into a mission for bettering
rural education. In a letter to Berea written at Goettingen in
July, 1892, he underscored his words that Berea's moral influ-
ence upon the public depended upon the number of her stu-
dents and the quality of her instruction. 8 One of the four reso-
lutions which he presented to the Berea trustees two months
later as conditions of his acceptance contained a pledge that
Berea should have "courses adapted to various wants." 9 The
new president began to build his program upon these two ideas,
a great increase in enrollment and the adaptation of Berea's
program to the students' needs.

President Frost's inaugural address at the close of his first
year was an earnest call to the friends of Berea to join with him
in his new plans: "We have a mission in educational reform.
. . . The world still waits for some school which will fearlessly
put in practice several reforms which are approved by all
thoughtful educators, but as yet nowhere fully realized." He
added that while Berea would furnish its share of inventors,
statesmen, and preachers, it would also find satisfaction in fur-
nishing "some corporals and privates for the army of the Lord
and good school-teachers, good local magistrates, good deacons,
and good deacons' wives." 10 The following day he was more
specific in his stirring report to the trustees. "Now a college
can prosper without a good many things, . . . but it cannot
prosper without students," he said, and he reminded them that
in the past year there were fewer students enrolled than seven

88 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

years before, and that Berea as an "engine of universal civiliza-
tion" must carry on many forms of education at once, teaching
the people "how to get a living and how to live." 11

President Frost's reorganizing zeal, however, did not extend
to the College Department. When in his inaugural address he
pictured Berea College as standing with a spade and a spelling
book in one hand and a telescope and a Greek testament in the
other, he had no mind to replace the Greek book and the tele-
scope with another spade and speller. In each catalog issued
during the twenty-eight years of his administration, he referred
to Berea's classical course as the standard course of the Ameri-
can college. In his annual report of 1902, written when he was
forty-eight years of age, he said that the College course was
without "fancy" electives for the training of specialists and was
"quite like the course which men now in middle life took in
Northern colleges before the elective system came in." The
other College courses offered in Berea remained much the same
as they had been before he became president. While they were
called four-year courses, the four-year period included one or
two years of Preparatory work. The catalog of 1910 showed
that another two-year College course had been added, the
pedagogical course (B. Fed.), and the 1916 catalog showed that
while the scientific course had been raised to four College years
in length, another two-year course had been added, the philo-
sophical course (Ph. B.).

The institution's increase in numbers made it possible for
the College to offer more courses, but these were usually addi-
tions to the fields of study already offered. To be sure, when
Berea College found itself blessed with a scholar as superior as
Professor S. C. Mason on its secondary agricultural staff, it
added three College courses in forestry to be taught by Pro-
fessor Mason; but as soon as he left Berea, forestry was dropped
from the catalog. The addition of a single course in the fine arts
and one in choral music was altogether in consonance with
Berea's College traditions. The addition of pedagogical courses
was justified by state requirements. It was a different matter,

Changing Patterns of Education 89

however, when two courses in agriculture were introduced as
College electives in 1915-1916, and when two courses in home
economics were offered to College women in 1918-1919. The
courses in agriculture and home economics were forerunners
of a new College policy.

A thoughtful guest who in 1919 studied Berea's adaptations
to needs wrote regarding Berea College: '"The institution has
grown out of all recognition, but the traditional college is still
small, as it ought to be. Between the mountaineer and the
academic curriculum is a great gulf that must be bridged." 12 It
was the bridging of this gulf that became Berea's great task
after President Frost's retirement. While the College Depart-
ment in the twenty-eight years of the Frost administration in-
creased from 25 in 1893 to 215 in 1920, the ratio of its attend-
ance to the total attendance of the institution was barely as
high as the ratio in the twenty years before his coming to Berea.

In President Frost's first year the Preparatory Department
was divided into two administrative sections, the secondary
Academy and the elementary Model Schools. The Academy
remained a conservative preparatory department until 1905, its
curriculum being as little disturbed by the Frost reforms as
was the College for which it prepared students. Then several
short courses were added to the Academy, only one of which
remained in the Academy for more than a few years. This Eng-
lish Academy course did not prepare for College and was of
slow growth as compared with the Preparatory Academy
course, which showed an attendance rising in fifteen years from
168 in 1909 to 592 in 1924 under the skillful direction of Dean
Francis E. Matheny, who was a master leader of high-spirited
young students.

in

PRESIDENT FROST during his first year in office revived the
normal course, which had been a part of the Preparatory De-
partment before 1883. He believed that the host of teachers

90 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

who went out to teach IB the rural schools would be the most
effective means of spreading Berea's invitation to learning.
Before long he wrote that "the head of the Normal Department
should also be a university lecturer, selected with special refer-
ence to his ability to reach and win the mountain people." 13

This normal course was at first only a program of studies
which covered three years of secondary work. Then in 1896
the president brought from Illinois an experienced training
teacher, Mrs. Eliza H. Yocum, who had as high a degree as any
of the professors and upon whom he bestowed the title of dean
of the Normal Department, a woman teacher being Berea's
first dean. For some years the Normal Department borrowed
teaching time from other departments. The use of a borrowed
teacher of horticulture such as Professor Mason, a drawing
teacher such as Charles A. King, superintendent of buildings,
and a sewing teacher like Mrs. Jennie Lester Hill soon increased
interest in the fast-growing Normal Department. The vitality
of this teacher-training department was shown by its growth
in numbers from 6 in 1894 to 452 in 1920.

Dean John W. Dinsmore was especially successful in build-
ing up numbers, increasing the department from 87 in 1900 to
301 when he left in 1913. By 1907 the Normal Department had
a faculty of its own, and from this devoted Normal faculty
came four small books written especially for rural teachers:
Dinsmore's Teaching a District School (1908), for which Presi-
dent Frost wrote an introduction in which he said: "It cheers
my heart to know that this little book is to go forth as a helper
to a country school teacher of our land. . . . Professor Dinsmore
has been in a thousand school houses like yours. He knows
hundreds of trustees, parents, and pupils exactly like those in
your district"; 14 John E. Calfee's Rural Arithmetic (1912); C. D.
Lewis' Waterboys and Other Stories ( 1913), a delightful nature
study reader; and J. F. Smith's Reading and Composition for
Rural Schools (1916).

Practice teaching in the Model Schools was offered in the
catalog of 1894, and in the sixty years since that time Berea

Changing Patterns of Education 91

College has put special emphasis upon directed teacher instruc-
tion. In 1910 the adult elementary students of the Model
Schools were separated in organization from the town children
under fifteen years of age. The young adults constituted the
Foundation School, and the children became the Training
School. Both groups were used for practice teaching. In 1913
Knapp Hall, a new brick building planned specifically for stu-
dent observation and teaching, was dedicated as Berea's Train-
ing School.

In the year 1907-1908 the Normal offerings consisted en-
tirely of secondary work: a one-year course leading to a county
certificate; a three-year course leading to a state certificate; and
a four-year course, which included geometry and some Latin,
leading to a state diploma. In the catalog of this year a sug-
gestion was made that a student with teaching experience
might take certain College courses and earn a Bachelor of
Pedagogy degree. It was not until two years later that the Col-
lege Department explained this course, admitting that although
it was a four-year course, its requirements for admission were
less severe than for the classical course. The first students to
receive this B. Fed. degree were two young men who graduated
in 1912.

Dean Cloyd N. McAllister became the Normal dean in 1913,
and brought with him a keen interest in extending Berea's
practical teacher training to a genuine rural situation with rural
trustees, rural parents, and rural pupils. For many years the
one-room school at Narrow Gap had been used for observation,
but it was not well suited for such work. After a trial in a rural
community west of the Ridge, a better situation was found
about three miles south of the Ridge, where in January, 1917,
the Scaffold Cane Community School was opened. It was
organized through the co-operation of Berea College, the Madi-
son County School Board, and thirty-nine families of the dis-
trict. Berea College had the right to nominate the teacher and
to use the school for observation and student teaching. 15 Here
for the next ten years under Dean McAllister's guidance Berea

92 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

Normal students learned the possibilities of the one-room coun-
try school, and Berea College learned how difficult a matter it
was to conduct such a school in an actual rural situation.

IV

IN THE INTRODUCTION of vocational courses President Frost
made his greatest departure from conventional college policy.
His interest in industrial education had a much deeper root
than its possible use as a means of earning money for educa-
tion. In his inaugural address he expressed in weighted words
the moral purpose that shaped his later years of experience
with manual education: "We have no diviner call than to
gather the multitudes who will otherwise be untaught, hold
them for a longer or shorter time according to their capacity,
and give each youth a bent in the upward direction." Eight
years later he said with his native optimism: "The Applied
Science Course will be the most adapted of all our adaptations.
It will make the gifts of science available in the remote cottage.
... In the course of ten years this Department of Applied Sci-
ence ought to benefit a million people who have never seen
Berea." 16 In his first year he began the construction of a $500
house where cooking and sewing would be taught, and laid
plans for a woodworking shop. In the midst of these early plans
he said impetuously to his faculty: "Industrial education ought
to have been the first department instead of the last established
at Berea. . . . For a large part of our students manual training
and domestic industry are more important than anything else
except the Ten Commandments." 17 By the close of his ad-
ministration there were 487 students attending Berea's Voca-
tional Department, more than twice as many as were registered
in the College Department.

At first the lessons in sewing were a part of the course of
study for all girls in the Model Schools; and cooking (for girls)
and woodworking (for boys) were added to the Grammar

STUDENT LABOR IN THE EARLY 1900's
Top: College garden; bottom: College laundry

BEREA STUDENTS AT WORK
Top: Sheep-shearing contest in the 1920's; bottom: College bakery

Changing Patterns of Education 93

School course. When Professor Mason moved to Berea, his
course in elementary horticulture was added to the offerings for
the older Model School boys. Beginning in 1899 a two-year
course in nurses' training was offered at the newly founded Col-
lege Hospital, and a diploma was given for successful comple-
tion of the course. 18 In 1900 two diploma courses were offered
to those Model School students who had finished at least the
fifth grade. In these two-year courses, farm economy (for
Boys) and home economy (for girls), the students devoted
half their time to such studies as English composition, history,
algebra, and physiology, and the rest of their time to their
Vocational studies. By 1909 there were five of these two-year
courses in the catalog, besides some shorter-term certificate
courses in such skills as telegraphy and bricklaying. Up to this
time the Vocational students had taken their general subjects
in some other department, but in this year they began to have
their own faculty for teaching general subjects. The Vocational
Schools had become a department.

It is profitable to observe the courses offered to these sec-
ondary students who would probably never enter college. Con-
sider the offerings in the two-year (secondaiy) Home Science
School in the catalog of 1914. Besides plain sewing, dress-
making, cooking, nutrition, home nursing, house care and buy-
ing, laundry, millinery, and weaving, the student would study
physiology, beginning chemistry, everyday physics, science of
wealth, science of conduct, and letter writing, and also Bible
and speech. Take the offerings of the Vocational School of
Agriculture in the same year: soils, farm crops, vegetable gar-
dening, rural life, feeding stock, dairying, stock judging, for-
estry, poultry, farm management, veterinary science, and fruit
culture, as well as beginning economics, letter writing, Bible,
ethics, English classics, political science, accounts, and chem-
istry. It was a wonderful program, but the reader questions the
ability of secondary students to handle so much in two years.

There were plenty of the faculty and trustees who criticized
these short courses which President Frost encouraged, but to

94 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

the very close of Ms administration lie believed that he was in
the right. In Ms farewell report in 1920 he wrote:

"At any rate the mountains are not needing men with long
drawn out education just now so much as they are needing
preachers with feeling for the common folks, teachers, farm-
demonstrators, nurses, surveyors. It has been a crime for the
custodians of education to say, 'We will only serve it out in car-
load lots. Give us four years in Preparatory and four years in
College or you can have no crown and no recognition from us/

"The State universities, more responsive than the Christian
colleges to the popular needs, are offering to give out educa-
tion in quantities adapted to the consumer. They have the
car-load lots, but they have also retail departments, and even
ten-cent counters. But without these precedents Berea was
brave enough to do what as FaircMld said, 'the people really
needed.' . . .

"Beyond the Foundation School ... we offer a number of
two-year courses, one for teachers, one for farmers, one for
housekeepers, one for carpenters, and one in the Academy,
called the English course, which is really a shortened and
adapted College course. . . . We have frankly said: "Your age,
your tastes, the family condition at home, the need for your
active work are such that you ought not to try to stay four
years more. So we will give you the best possible selection for
a two-year course. If you finish that, we will recognize you as
a scholar/ " 19

Back in 1902 President Frost, realizing that Berea College
with more than eight hundred students needed improved
organization, proposed in Ms annual report to put some one
man in charge of each existing department with responsibility
for both class work and discipline. Presently he assigned each
teacher to one department, even though that teacher taught in
several departments. By 1913 President Frost conceived of
each department as having its own type of education, its own
campus, dormitories, dining rooms, and even its own athletic
field. Each department, College, Academy, Normal, Voca-

Changing Patterns of Education, 95

tional, and Foundation, should have an enrollment of about
four hundred students, half men, half women. In his 1918 re-
port to the trustees he wrote: "The student in any one of these
schools enjoys, we hope, the same intimate acquaintance and
the same personal care that he could enjoy in a small institution.
At the same time he has the very great economies, as well as the
enthusiasms and the inspirations that are possible only when
large numbers are assembled in one place." But he was wise
enough to add: "Our organization and management ought to
be a matter of constant study/' 20

IN THE DECADE following President Frost's retirement a series
of important changes took place. All of these changes grew
directly out of developments then evident either in American
colleges or in the mountain field. They had already been con-
sidered frequently and seriously by the faculty, especially by
the College professors, to some of whom they seemed long
overdue; but to Emeritus President Frost they seemed like re-
treat from education for the common man.

One of these changes was made in 1921 by the faculty's
decision that only one degree, the Bachelor of Arts degree at
the close of a four-year course, should be awarded by Berea
College. 21 This brought to an end the flowering of short-term
degrees that had had their beginning under President Fair-
child. Thereafter a College student in his junior and senior
years would pursue a major to the extent of thirty-three or
thirty-six hours, and this major would be named on his diploma,
as for example, Major in Chemistry. In 1921 neither agriculture
nor home economics was listed in the catalog among the pos-
sible major fields, but by 1923 they appeared among the majors.
Then in 1926 a Bachelor of Science degree was offered to such
majors as would fulfull the Smith-Hughes requirements in agri-
culture or in home economics in addition to the requirements

96 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

for a Bachelor of Arts degree. This addition of a four-year B.S.
degree based upon a fifteen-unit secondary course, in order to
qualify under the federal Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, illustrates
how the pressure of the times caused changes at Berea.

A somewhat similar pressure of new opportunities during
and after World War I led to a change in the School of Nursing
in 1920-1921. In 1920 the catalog announced that there were
to be two distinct nursing courses thereafter. The shorter
course would be "exactly like the course which has been given
ever since the Hospital was founded." The longer course would
be for three years and would prepare its graduates for the state
examination "which w T hen successfully passed gives these young
women the title of Registered Nurse, and grants to them all the
legal and professional privileges which go with the R. N. They
are permitted to practice in other States and are admitted to
Red Cross and Government Service." 22 This course included
nine-months experience in the Louisville City Hospital, where
the student nurses could have a broader experience than in
Berea. A year later (1921) the catalog announced that the
short course had been discontinued and that the only course to
be offered was the standard three-year course preparing for
state registration. Additional opportunities were offered for
graduates of this course, such as public health, social service,
and institutional positions. The short course has never been
brought back. Instead, because of developments in the nursing
profession a four-year degree course in nursing is now under
consideration in Berea College.

In 1924 a change was made that affected four of the five
existing schools. The Vocational Department was closed as a
separate disciplinary and educational unit, although vocational
courses continued to be given to students of the remaining
departments. The segregation of students taking vocational
courses had finally given way to the free choice of vocational
courses by a member of any department. The action was in no
sense a blow to vocational education, but a rebuff to depart-
mental segregation.

Changing Patterns of Education 97

At the same time, 1924, the first year of the Normal De-
partment and the ninth grade of the Academy were transferred
to the Foundation School In the expectation that some of the
advantages claimed by the junior-high-school movement might
result from this partial reorganization of the Foundation School.

The thirteen years between 1918 and 1931 show how strong
was the pressure of outside forces In shaping Berea's pattern
of education. They were years of struggle for the Normal De-
partment as well as for the Normal dean, Dr. C. N. McAllister,
who was one of Berea's outstanding leaders. One of his chief
concerns was the one-room school in the remote valley, and
his other main concern was improvement in standards of
teacher training in the state, no matter what this did to his
Normal Department In Berea College.

The Kentucky law of 1918 provided that a private school
doing a grade of work equal to that required by the state normal
schools might after proper Inspection recommend certain of its
students to the state superintendent of public instruction, who
would issue to them normal school certificates. Berea's Normal
Department was inspected immediately, and several hundred
elementary and intermediate normal school certificates were
issued to Berea students.

In 1922 the General Assembly raised the requirement for
the advanced normal school certificate so that it could be ob-
tained only by those who had completed the equivalent of two
years of study above the high school grade. In order to meet
the requirements of this 1922 law, the College dean and Dean
McAllister with fine co-operation arranged so that a student
seeking this advanced certificate would be enrolled in both the
College and the Normal Department, and his program of
studies would have to be approved by both deans. There was
considerable headshaklng over this arrangement, but it was
regarded as a temporary thing. 23 Under the new certification
law of 1926 the only terminal course of the Normal Department
was a four-year (secondary) course for which a Berea diploma
was awarded; and the catalog warned that those expecting a

98 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

state certificate should select their courses carefully so as to
conform with state requirements. The former two-year cer-
tificate course had been eliminated in the interest of higher
standards.

The Certification Law of 1930 provided that no one could
secure any kind of teaching certificate hereafter in Kentucky
without college training. After a year of trial the Berea Normal
Department came to the conclusion that it could not operate
successfully without some kind of certificate to offer its stu-
dents. President Hutchins in his baccalaureate address, May
21, 1931, spoke of the death of the Normal Department as a
triumph rather than a defeat. "Dean McAllister has fought for
better schools and better teachers for the mountains. . . . The
Normal School which is to die tomorrow salutes you."

VI

WHEN WILLIAM J. HUTCHINS became president of Berea Col-
lege, the attendance of the College Department was barely 9
per cent of the total attendance. When he retired in 1939, the
four years of the College contained 40 per cent of the student
body, and the 1,136 students attending the College Depart-
ment in 1953-1954 constituted 73 per cent of the total attend-
ance. The reasons for this change in ratio lie in the changing
times, as has already been shown in the matter of teacher
certification. The Kentucky law of 1914 requiring each county
to provide at least one high school created a demand for more
teachers with at least a four-year college education. The de-
velopments in agriculture created a pressure that the institu-
tion should provide full college preparation for agricultural
and home demonstration agents and Smith-Hughes teachers.
Developments in hospitals necessitated more training for more
nurses and dietitians. The new Red Cross and other social
service personnel required college-trained social workers. Busi-
ness required men with training beyond the secondary tech-

Changing Patterns of Education 99

niques of typing, stenography, and bookkeeping. Oil com-
panies asked for college men who had majored in geology.
Law, medical, and engineering schools were no longer willing
to take applicants without college work. Even hotel manage-
ment sought men who had majored in college economics. Ail
of these pressures were youth's opportunities.

Sometimes in the early years of President W. J. Hutchins'
administration people who knew of Berea's very active lower
schools, which then were larger in enrollment than the College,
would inquire why Berea had any College Department. Presi-
dent Hutchins* answer was: "Our mountain students have as
good a right to a higher education as anyone else, and they are
fully as likely to make a worthy use of it. For the great mass of
our College students it is Berea or nothing. . . . Furthermore,
if our mountain students should leave the mountains for their
college course, the mountains w r ould almost certainly lose their
life service/' 24 Upon another occasion he wrote: "In this de-
partment we hope to train 'the leaders of the leaders' of the
mountains/' 25

Dr. John C. Campbell in a study made for the Russell Sage
Foundation in 1917 showed his apprehension lest with the in-
crease of public secondary schools in the southern mountains
the "mountain colleges" would lapse into the conventional
type of college that was unadapted to a special work. "It is to
be hoped, however, that some will resist the temptation to
develop along traditional lines and be willing to evolve, through
experimental stages, into higher institutions especially empha-
sizing a training that will meet regional needs/' 26 The thirty-
eight years since these words were written have been filled at
Berea College with experiments in adaptations to economic,
social, religious, and other cultural needs. In 1932 in the midst
of this evolution Trustee Miles E. Marsh wrote a letter of pas-
sionate earnestness to his fellow trustees, reminding them that
their vision would determine the outcome of Berea's efforts. He
begged them not to be led astray by standards that did not
take into account Berea's great aim of establishing a better way

100 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

of living in the southern mountain area. He then wrote: "The
need of the mountain work now is for college-trained teachers.
These people will have more resources within themselves and
will feel less keenly the tinsel of civilization. They will be
sustained by real vision. They will be recognized as men and
women fitly trained for the work they are attempting to do.
Such recognition is very important. This will mean that Berea's
entire attention and effort will finally be given over to the work
of the College. 3 ' 27

Since 1926 the College has been a member of the Southern
Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Early in 1906
Berea College had been refused membership because of the
small enrollment of the College Department (34) and the in-
sufficient separation of its departments. 28 In 1924 President
Hutchins in opening correspondence with the Association in
regard to membership wrote: "Some of our most worthy grad-
uates . . . are having difficulty in getting recognition as prin-
cipals of schools in North Carolina., for example, and as stu-
dents in graduate schools/' 29 Two years later (1926) Berea
was able to give its students the advantages coming from the
College's membership in this Association, though this recogni-
tion was conditional upon Berea's furnishing better laboratory
facilities, a condition that was met in 1928 by the erection of a
Science Building.

VII

THE ELIMINATION of the Vocational Department in 1924 and
the Normal Department in 1931 led to the suggestion of a fur-
ther reorganization that would add the tenth grade of Academy
work to the Foundation School, would combine the eleventh
and twelfth grades with the College freshman and sophomore
years to make a Lower Division of the College, and unite the
junior and senior years into an Upper Division. This plan also
provided for an evaluation of the new plan after five years of
trial.

Changing Patterns of Education 101

The new organization was put into effect in the fall of 1938.
The evaluation began in 1942, when the weakness of the four-
two plan had already become clear. This organization had
broken apart the four-year college, hampering the social and
academic relations of student and faculty Me. The four-year
Lower Division was not really a four-year school at all, for the
eleventh-twelfth grade section was largely a terminal group
finishing what remained in their minds as a high school course
without the trappings of graduation, while the freshmen were
newcomers whose only ties were with the sophomores above
them. The next problem was to reorganize the reorganization
so as to preserve its advantages and avoid its obvious dis-
advantages.

After an incredible amount of study, reading, and observa-
tion on the part of faculty committees, the present organization
was put into operation in the fall of 1947. The secondary grades
were made happy by being united with the Foundation School.
The four-year College was reunited in administration and in
student and faculty Me, although there were certain scholastic
distinctions made between courses of the General College
(freshmen and sophomores) which emphasized liberal educa-
tion, and the Senior College, in which each student pursued
his line of specialization, that is, his major.

A considerable number of freshmen were likely to come to
college with poor preparation that betrayed the inferior teach-
ing of small rural high schools. A plan was made to adapt
Berea's college courses to such high school graduates, if they
showed by testing that aside from poor educational tools they
were of college calibre. Basic courses without College credit
were set up, to which freshmen deficient in English, mathe-
matics, geography, or American history were assigned. These
students, however, were admitted as freshmen and might be
assigned to some freshmen courses (with credit). It was also
arranged that a few superior students who had not graduated
from high school but had shown that they were almost ready
for college might enter upon some freshman work. These ex-

102 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

perimental basic courses were given tentative approval by the
Southern Association. The success of the remedial basic plan
depends to a large extent upon the testing program. For ex-
ample, before classes begin, the director of guidance and test-
ing can discover a serious weakness in arithmetic and take steps
to remedy it so that the student's first year in college is not
wrecked by discouragement in this one line.

The liberal arts program of the General College is planned
to develop interests and vision for the rest of life. Instead of
the traditional series of courses that divide and still further
subdivide learning, this freshman-sophomore plan of study co-
ordinates thought around a few cores such as the biological sci-
ences in one full course, the physical sciences in another course,
a survey of the social sciences in another, an eight-hour course
in the humanities as expressed in music, literature, and art, pre-
ceded by a course that introduces the history of Western civili-
zation, and a series of two courses in Bible that introduce the
Old and the New Testament. If a student has studied a foreign
language in high school, he may fulfill his college language re-
quirement (without college credit) by passing a proficiency
test; or he may begin the study of a foreign language in college
(for college credit) and take his proficiency test when he feels
ready for it. All in all this two-year adventure in Western
culture and scientific thought is to an unusual degree a humane
education.

The Senior College is organized for specialization. For ob-
taining the B.A. degree the catalog lists twenty-three subjects
from which a student may select a major of twenty-four semes-
ter hours on the senior college level. The list includes physical
education, music, art, religion, agriculture, and home eco-
nomics, as well as such subjects as ancient languages, history,
and chemistry. In order to broaden the base for prospective
teachers, area majors are offered in the field of science, social
studies, and elementary education, with the requirement of
more than twenty-four hours in the area of concentration, but
less than this amount in any one subject within the area. The

Changing Patterns of Education 103

degree of Bachelor of Science is offered in agriculture, in home
economics, and in business administration. These areas of
special preparation have been selected because of needs in the
mountain field.

An upper-class student ordinarily has time for a few elec-
tives entirely outside his field of specialization. It is not uncom-
mon for a major in some such field as physics or political science
to sign up for a course in art, sociology, or music in his senior
year, saying: Tve looked forward all through college to taking
this course before I graduate." In this mood the reader thumbs
through the Berea College catalog at this moment to find such
alluring electives as: art and civilization; spring flora; consumer
economics; agriculture for elementary teachers; Greek classics
in translation; petroleum geology; public opinion and contem-
porary politics; nursery school participation; team sports; funda-
mentals of counseling; marriage and the family; rural social
life.

The Foundation School has become a four-year high school,
besides offering elementary work that is ungraded and adapted
to special needs. The work of the entire Foundation School is
enriched by the opportunity to take courses in the industrial
arts, agriculture, home economics, and business in addition to
academic subjects. In 1953-1954 the attendance of the Founda-
tion School was 359.

VIII

THIS STUDY would be unsatisfactory indeed if it did not show
some of the steps by which Berea's exceptional program in
physical education passed from narrow strife into its present
diversified service. In Berea College physical education and
health is now a serious department of study which offers
twenty-eight hours of College courses in the catalog.

Each of the important elements of today's pattern of phy-
sical education appeared long ago on the campus. In 1879 the
faculty appointed President Fairchild as chairman of a com-

104 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

mittee on grounds for ball playing. In 1894 the voice teacher
mentioned his four classes of gymnastic students, saying that
they had taken their exercises with wooden and iron dumb-
bells. He also mentioned the fact that he had given physical
examinations to sixty young men. In 1898 the Workers Manual
announced that the superintendent of the Hospital, a trained
nurse, would give general instruction in hygiene to various
classes of students. In the same year President Frost, realizing
the close connection between baths and exercise, wrote that
one of the three buildings he most needed was a bathroom and
gymnasium.

In 1901 Professor H. M. Jones commented upon the value
of ball playing on the Howard Hall diamond as a means of
establishing good will among the young men: "It is death to
provincialism. It is a liberal education. The game room, the
baseball diamond, and the new bathroom are three foci of high
value/' 30 But there were other sports than ball playing. In
1904 the Student Manual said that for participation in the field
day contests one requirement was that a contestant must be
passing in all his work. In 1906 the new College physician was
made "Superintendent of the Gymnasium, Bathrooms, and Hos-
pital." The Student Manual of 1906 announced: "The Gym-
nasium Committee is to cultivate a variety of athletic interests,
to enlist as many students as possible, and prevent undue con-
centration on any one line."

Unfortunately these good ideas did not become welded
into a program until Berea College had experienced fifteen
years of incredible bitterness over athletic events. This ani-
mosity, which affected both the intercollegiate and the intra-
mural games between 1906 and 1921, made each athletic sea-
son seem almost like wartime. By 1910 Berea's passionate zeal
for intercollegiate victories so possessed the institution that the
trustees directed President Frost to "limit contests with other
colleges to those in which Berea students may meet others on
terms of substantial equality and at moderate expense; and to
so regulate such contests as not to detract from the interest in

Changing Patterns of Education 105

home contests, or tempt our students to make athletics a too
absorbing pursuit." 31

Although the president eliminated all intercollegiate con-
tests except the uncommercialized track meet, the intramural
contests remained as bitter as ever. The ill feeling that lurked
between rival literary societies and the jealousy existing be-
tween departments, especially between the Academy and the
Normal Department, found expression in these games. At last
the futility of these perennial battles became so apparent as to
cause a strong reaction against them. Dean Matheny expressed
the new feeling when he wrote in 1921: "Perhaps we can start
on the larger program of physical education and in this way
draw off the previous intensity." 32 In the same year John Miller
as physical director did lead Berea men into this "larger pro-
gram/' By 1922 he had six hundred boys of all departments
participating in many kinds of physical activities. When he
left Berea in 1924, President Hutchins in speaking of his work
wrote: "Mr. Miller has believed in sport for sport's sake, and
has steadfastly refused .to be victimized by the prevalent mania
for athletic victories at any price." 33 In 1940 the men's Phy-
sical Education Department could report 10 touch-football
teams on the College level, 8 speedball teams, 8 soccer teams,
40 basketball teams playing a weekly schedule on the campus,
4 intramural swimming teams, and 4 baseball teams playing a
fuU schedule. 34

Since 1925 the courses in physical education required of
freshmen and sophomores have received college credit. Many
students also take elective college work in this field. The phy-
sical education program of today emphasizes the value of learn-
ing correct body mechanics in order to keep the body in
balance for doing life's work, and the satisfaction of learning
certain sports selected according to each individual's taste and
capacity. Such a pattern of physical education accords well
with a program of liberal education. Nowadays each student
is given a complete physical examination to discover defects
that ought to be observed or that might be corrected. For

106 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

several days each fall a score of outstanding physicians and
dentists from Lexington, Cincinnati, and Cleveland give these
physical examinations for the love of youth, not for pay. Now
not a few of these doctors are Berea College alumni.

The College engages with sanity in some extramural sports:
basketball, cross-country running, swimming, track, tennis, and
baseball, but not football. When the Berea team wins, there
is a brief but audible time of rejoicing, after which the matter
is forgotten; when it loses, there echoes the philosophic reas-
surance that Berea's athletic program, of course, is part of a
course in physical education regardless of victory or defeat.

Soon after Berea College changed from athletic struggle to
genuine physical education, the work of the Physical Edu-
cation Department was improved by the gift of two new
buildings: in 1926 the Woods-Penniman Building, of which a
women's gymnasium was a part, and two years later the Charles
Ward Seabury Gymnasium for men, a well-equipped physical
education center with a large swimming pool. The tablet
dedicating the Seabury Gymnasium to the young men of Berea
speaks words of historic importance: "that they may here train
their bodies to be swift and enduring servants of the good will,
that they may here learn to play in generous rivalry and co-
operation, to face danger without dismay, victory without
conceit.' 7

IX

SCHOLARSHIP DAY late in the spring has in recent years be-
come a memorable occasion in Berea. On that day honor is
paid to those students who have achieved more than ordinary
success in scholastic work. The program in the Chapel always
opens with an address upon some phase of higher education
and its relation to society. This is usually followed by an-
nouncement of those upperclassmen chosen for membership in
the local chapters of various national honor societies. The
criteria for admission vary, of course, with the charters of these

Changing Patterns of Education 107

societies. Berea College has never had social fraternities and
sororities in its campus life, but with the growth of the four-
year college in the past thirty-five years, Berea has welcomed
Greek letter honor societies as a stimulus to young scholars.

Lists of nominees prepared by the honor societies with
assistance from the registrar's files are read to the assembly.
The students named stand in their places to receive this recog-
nition of their scholastic achievement. On Scholarship Day,
May 18, 1954, students were welcomed into the Berea chapters
of the following honor societies : Alpha Psi Omega for superior
work in writing, acting, and producing plays, and in the culti-
vation of good dramatic taste; Beta Beta Beta for achievement
in the biological sciences; Delta Phi Delta for work in the Ger-
man language; Pi Gamma Mu for achievement in the social
sciences; Sigma Pi Sigma for work in physics; Tau Kappa Alpha
for achievement in public speaking, especially in oratory and
debate. Members were also welcomed into two local honor
societies that were founded to meet a local need: Tau Delta
Tau for superior work in all phases of stagecraft except acting;
and Pi Alpha, an honor society in the science area to recognize
ability and interest in the general field of science.

There had been much talk of founding a local chapter of
some national honor society which emphasized the ideals of
scholarship in all fields, including agriculture and home eco-
nomics. The desired emphasis was found in Phi Kappa Phi,
a local chapter of which was installed in November, 1953. It
presented its first list of nominees on Scholarship Day, 1954.

The serious interest of Berea seniors in their major field is
attested by the large number attending graduate and profes-
sional schools after completing their undergraduate work.

Berea College was among the institutions considered in the
Knapp-Greenbaum study (1952), which aimed to discover the
centers of study from which the next generation of scholars
was likely to come. This study, financed by the Fund for the
Advancement of Education, studied the award of graduate fel-
lowships over $400 which were made to American college and

108 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

university graduates between 1946 and 1951. This study ex-
cluded those institutions which graduated fewer than four hun-
dred students in this six-year period, those which gave incom-
plete information, and, for the "all-male index," the "all-women
colleges," leaving 377 colleges and universities for special in-
vestigation. An all-male index of awardees in each of these 377
institutions was secured, this index showing the ratio of the
number of male awardees of graduate fellowships to the total
number of graduates in a given institution in this six-year
period. Tables were then made of the top fifty schools among
these 377 institutions classified on the basis of their index of
male recipients of scholarships for advanced study. In this list
of fifty, only three southern colleges were listed, the University
of the South, William and Mary College, and Berea College.
Tables were also made listing the top twenty schools in index
of male graduate awardees in the fields of science, social sci-
ence, and humanities. Berea College was the only southern
college in the top twenty in science, though it was not included
in the other two fields. 35

A part of the investigation consisted in an analysis of the
138 liberal arts colleges in the survey. Among the selected
liberal arts colleges in the United States as a whole, Berea
ranked thirteenth in the index of male graduate awardees,
while among the twenty-five selected liberal arts colleges in the
South it stood second in index of male awardees, being out-
ranked only by the University of the South. The fellowships
involved were divided into three classes those from a govern-
mental agency, those from a foundation, and those from a uni-
versity. Most of the graduate awards granted to Berea students
were university fellowships. In the selected liberal arts col-
leges in the entire United States, Berea tied with DePauw for
eleventh place in index of university fellowships, but among the
twenty-five selected liberal arts colleges of the South it ranked
first in index of graduate fellowships. 36

The records in the Berea registrar's office are interesting to
study in regard to the number going on to graduate study after

CHIMES PLAYING Is LABOR, Too
Gilbert Roberts now teaches mathematics at Berea

T, c ... Courtesy of the Louisville Courier- Journal

BEKEA STUDENTS WEAVING AT FIKESIDE INDUSTRIES

Changing Patterns of Education 109

graduation from Berea. In the ten-year period from 1941 to
1950 inclusive, the percentage of seniors going into graduate
work varied from a low of 30 in 1945 to a high of 48 in 1948,
that is to say, from 32 in a class of 108 in 1945 to 75 in a class of
168 in 1948. The largest number going to graduate school in
any one year of this period was 106 in a class of 238 in 1949
(44.5 per cent).

Many Berea students work for a few years before they feel
financially able to attend graduate school. The registrar's rec-
ords for 1954 show that sixty-five graduate degrees were
awarded by other institutions to Berea alumni in that year,
though some of these students had been considerably retarded
in their progress by lack of funds. Of these degrees 18 were
Master of Arts, 17 Master of Science, 8 Doctor of Philosophy, 5
Doctor of Medicine, 2 Doctor of Dental Surgery, one Doctor of
Dental Medicine, 3 Doctor of Education, one Master of Educa-
tion, 2 Master of Business Administration, one Master of Social
Work, 6 Bachelor of Divinity, and one Master of Theology.

Berea College attempts to do excellent undergraduate work.
As a college it emphasizes among its faculty strong teaching
rather than research; but where there is a combination of stu-
dent ability and great teaching, a desire to do research inevit-
ably follows. Many of Berea's majors in the field of science are
important research men in the laboratories of industry. Berea
attempts through the high quality of its teaching to aid students
in discovering purposes for their own lives, and encourages
them to proceed on paths of social usefulness and creative ex-
pression, regardless of past handicaps.

CHAPTER f-

U: Labor tor
Education

THE FIRST Constitution of Berea College contained a state-
ment that the Institution would try to furnish some labor as an
aid to students in securing an education; and each revision to
the present day has contained a similar statement.

Berea College was founded in the ebb of a stirring but
short-lived experiment in American education, the combina-
tion of education and labor. For example, from Oneida Insti-
tute (1827) the movement had passed to Lane Seminary in
Cincinnati and then to Obeiiin under the leadership of Theo-
dore D. Weld, who was at that time America's most persuasive
spokesman for the values of manual labor in higher education.

In the manual labor schools of the 1830's and early 1840's
several hours of manual labor were required each day from the
student, and this labor was furnished and paid for by the col-
lege. Most often a large college farm provided a demand for
such labor, and frequently the students worked In college shops
at such trades as carpentry, printing, blacksmithing, and broom-
making, for which they were paid a small wage. In 1831 a
National Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary In-
stitutions was founded, and Theodore D. Weld was selected to
be the general agent of the organization. His one annual re-

Labor for Education 111

port, published in 1833, set forth thirteen advantages of the
manual labor system in higher education. The tenth point in
this long list was that manual labor would greatly diminish the
expense of education. First on the list of advantages was the
statement that manual labor furnished exercise most natural to
man, and other points brought out its value in character de-
velopment and in establishing habits of industry. 1

Educational institutions soon found their manual labor
experiment facing business difficulties. Students laboring at
manual work were likely to be too unskilled to be efficient, or
too proud to be industrious. The importance of management
and finance was not sufficiently respected by school administra-
tions, and teachers were frequently unco-operative because
they wished for a larger share of the students' effort. 2 By the
time John G. Fee was a student in Lane Seminary, Weld had
already left Lane and the manual labor system had passed its
prime. When J. A. R. Rogers graduated from Oberlin, its
manual labor program in the strict sense of the word was a
thing of the past. Both Fee and Rogers in the early days of
Berea looked upon labor as an excellent means of helping a
young man through college, but they did not talk of its edu-
cational values, as Weld and his European predecessors Jean
Jacques Rousseau and Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg had
done.

While the Berea institution was still a district school at-
tended by children resident in the vicinity, the pupils lived at
home with their parents; but already in 1856 Fee was looking
ahead to a college "that will furnish the best possible facilities
for those with small means who have energy of character that
will lead them to work their way through this world." 3 The
first Berea College catalog issued after the Civil War announced
that the institution would furnish industrious young men with
sufficient labor to enable them to pay a portion of their ex-
penses; but in a historical sketch of the College (1869) J. A. R.
Rogers wrote without equivocation regarding labor in Berea
College: "It was not intended that the Institution should be

112 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

what is technically called *a manual labor school/ The experi-
ments to establish such institutions elsewhere did not seem to
warrant the expense of organizing a manual labor department
under the management of the college, but the trustees proposed
to secure labor for the students in other ways. In this respect
thus far, they have been reasonably successful." 4

ii

PRESIDENT FAIRCHILD'S inaugural address (July, 1869) con-
tained a detailed statement of what he understood to be the
characteristics of Berea College. Among these he counted the
provisions made so that the neediest student might secure a
college education, if he had the chance to work. The College,
he said, took pains to keep expenses low and to furnish the
means of self-support. It could furnish labor for a considerable
number, and others could find work "among the inhabitants." 5

President Fairchild, who was fifteen years older than Pro-
fessor Rogers, had been a member of the first graduating class
of Oberlin College and knew by experience the rigors of the
manual labor system in its original form. In a baccalaureate
address twelve years after his inauguration, he said, in speaking
of the effort required to meet the cost of education: "I do not
speak as a theorist on this subject. My first experience away at
school was at sixteen with a younger brother in a little old
house, boarding ourselves. If you get into a pinch, any of you,
at any time, and you know not which way to turn, you know
where to find a sympathizing heart." 6

He was also well aware of the importance of supervision
over young working students. Among the interesting references
to his personal supervision of student labor is that of an alum-
nus of the Berea College class of 1881: "Though he had a
sense of the dignity of his position, this did not keep him from
being the most democratic of men. ... In my day he super-
vised the manual labor of the young men. He indicated the

Labor for Education 113

particular lot of wood the student was to chop or saw, and tie
personally made the measurements and issued the vouchers to

??7

US. 7

Much o the work done by students in these two decades
was unskilled labor. At a conference of college executives in
Nashville, 1881, President FaircMld expressed frankly his opin-
ion of student labor: "Our students are engaged in making
roads at Berea. They have never tried to run a farm. I have
seen student efforts to run a farm, but they have never
amounted to much. I do not think it can be made successful.
I would not undertake to run a garden with students. I can
make a good garden, but I have never seen a student who could
do it." 8 Angus Burleigh many years after his graduation in the
Berea College class of 1875 told of his labor in the construction
of Ladies' Hall in 1872, when he wheeled mud to the brick
mold in what is now the college garden. 9 In 1886 the Berea
Evangelist in a column of brevities remarked that many stu-
dents were making both muscle and money on the excavations
under way for Lincoln Hall. 10 It was not until Phelps Stokes
Chapel was built (1904-1906) that students were trained to
do the highly skilled labor required for permanent construc-
tion.

It is hard nowadays to think of a time when there were no
college industries to employ student labor. In 1884 Fee and
two friends had set up a small printshop and brought in a
student printer from Illinois to print their paper, the Berea
Evangelist. An editorial announced distinctly that the paper
was neither owned nor supported by Berea College. Before
the Evangelist expired in 1887, a college paper, the Berea Col-
lege Reporter, published its early numbers sporadically on this
press. After the College secured ownership of this press in

1889, the Reporter was published regularly for ten years.
These early student printers went far beyond the mere goal

of earning their college expenses. An editorial in the April,

1890, Reporter brimmed with pride: "All the manual labor
connected with getting out this issue has been done by students.

114 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

A class has been organized from those who indicated a desire
to learn the printing business, and they have carried this work
in addition to their school duties. ... In Berea there has not
been much instruction in what is generally called skilled labor.
It may well be that the printing of the Reporter is the begin-
ning of our Industrial Department." 11 In the next issue of the
Reporter, the statement that all the work upon this issue had
been done by young men learning the printer's trade was fol-
lowed by a report of the specific service performed by each of
the seven apprentice printers in setting up the paper.

Soon the student press was printing college publicity in
addition to the college paper. In 1895 it began to print college
catalogs and the Berea Quarterly, besides doing considerable
work for outsiders. In 1905 its name was changed from Stu-
dents' Job Print to Berea College Printing Department, which
was superseded in 1913 by the name Berea College Press. It is
important that the first skilled industry on the campus was
organized by a group of students who wanted to acquire a
skill, and who took pride in the quality of their work. The
Students' Job Print stands out as a landmark in Berea's labor
history.

in

PROFESSOR FROST in 1892, while he was considering the trus-
tees' invitation to accept the presidency of Berea College, made
careful inquiries as to Berea's facilities for self-supporting stu-
dents. "Manual labor experiments have usually failed. Presi-
dent Fairchild of Oberlin says they always must, but I am not
sure that he is right." He inquired as to whether there was any
possibility of securing water power in Berea, and suggested
that more concern for self-supporting students would cause
more students to come and to stay through the school year.
The labor policies which Berea pursued during the next twenty
years were embodied in one prescient sentence in this letter:
"If students could only rely upon ten cents an hour after a

Labor for Education 115

term's apprenticeship, It would be worth more than a 8100,000
endowment." 12 "A terra's apprenticeship" suggested the means
by which student labor could become skilled. When Professor
Frost accepted the presidency of Berea College on the follow-
ing September 8, 1892, the second of the four resolutions upon
which, he based his acceptance concluded with the pledge "to
secure better opportunities than now exist here or elsewhere
for self-supporting students to assist themselves."

On the same day President Frost persuaded the trustees to
pass another resolution, one which has been of great importance
to self-supporting students ever since that time: that tuition
hereafter was to be free. Although a small incidental fee was
retained to cover the cost of such services as heating and car-
ing for classrooms, the charge to cover the expense of actual
teaching was removed, 13 and from 1892 to the present Berea
College has had no tuition fee.

In his stern annual report to the trustees and faculty at the
close of his first year's administration, President Frost paid
much attention to the need for "productive industry." Though
he recognized the value of the young printing office, he de-
plored its lack of a competent superintendent. He spoke of
the college farm with discouragement, saying that it was
unreasonable for the College to buy vegetables in Cincimiati
and yet rent out the College's two hundred acres of farm land.
The problem, he explained, was to put the college land into a
proper state of cultivation and find a man of high qualifica-
tions to be the farmer, preferably a man from some state agri-
cultural college. This college farmer would teach apprentices
good fanning practices and at the same time enable them to
earn money for schooling. 14

It was not until five years after his coming to Berea that
President Frost found a scientific agriculturalist able to handle
class instruction and actual farming, Professor Silas C. Mason,
from the Kansas Agricultural College. Besides teaching Col-
lege courses in forestry, he also co-operated with the farm
foreman in such practical work as fencing, draining, gardening,

116 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

fruit raising, cleaning the forest, and making roads, thereby
furnishing instruction and employment to more than one hun-
dred young men.

IV

BEREA'S FIRESIDE Industries grew up in the 1890's, but their
origin was different from that of any other industry. They were
in a very literal sense fireside industries, because they were car-
ried on in the mountain homes where mothers with skill of
hand spun, wove, and quilted for the sake of their children's
education.

Soon after the Frosts came to Berea to live, a woman
brought in a ten-year-old hand-woven coverlet which she beg-
ged Mrs. Frost to buy for three dollars, the amount which the
mother needed in order to purchase medicine for her child.
Mrs. Frost bought the coverlet because of the mother's need,
and then showed it to her husband. President Frost presently
took this coverlet and some other fragments of hand weaving
to New England that he might show the skill of Kentucky
mountain women. 15 He soon learned how popular colonial pat-
tern weaving was among women of wealth, and already in
1895 he was writing letters home urging his wife to send him
still more hand-woven goods to give to certain donors.

In a summer trip on horseback to Owsley County in the
Kentucky hills he stopped overnight with a family at Travelers'
Rest, and in the course of the evening his host brought out
several armfuls of beautiful homespun coverlets and counter-
panes, saying regretfully that of course there was no market
now for these old-fashioned things. When President Frost
mounted his horse next morning to return home, he rode with
two meal sacks slung across his saddle, and they were stuffed
hard with the woven treasures that he had purchased.

President and Mrs. Frost saw that two things should be
done at once: Mountain women should be encouraged to dye,
spin, weave, and quilt so that their sons and daughters might

Labor for Education 117

have money for education, and Berea College should act as
middleman to bring these products out of the hills and find
markets for them among people who could afford to buy the
precious wares.

In 1896 the first Homespun Fair was held in Berea, its pur-
pose being to stimulate production. Commencement Day was
the ideal time for such a fair because several thousand people
would be wandering around the campus looking for interesting
sights. For the next twenty years this Homespun Fair, usually
held in Lincoln Hall., was a source of great encouragement to
mountain weavers (and whittlers). Cash prizes were offered
for home-dyed, homespun, hand-woven coverlets, for blankets
and counterpanes, linen and linsey woolsey by the piece, home-
made rag carpet, hand-knit socks and mitts, splint-bottomed
chairs, hickory-split baskets, and handmade ax handles. The
dye used had to be homemade, with the recipe for it given in
writing for each color. 16

Already in 1900 this fireside industry was considered im-
portant enough to deserve a kind of shop, as woodworking had
its own shop. The following year Squire Stapp's old log house
was moved from west of the ridge to a vacant lot on Jackson
Street in Berea to serve as a loom house. In 1902 another log
building was set up near the loom house. It was an unfinished
log church which was moved log by log the fifteen miles from
Jackson County in the hills, and when it had been roofed and
rechinked, it was given the name "Clover Bottom Cabin."
When Mrs. Jennie Lester Hill, a teacher of domestic science,
was made director of Fireside Industries, although she did not
know how to spin or weave, she proved to be a successful
director because she was a good businesswoman, skilled in
remote production and in marketing publicity.

The mountain women's production of homespuns received
recognition for quality even in the early years of this unusual
labor system. In 1900 their weaving received a medal from the
Paris Exposition; in 1901 a second medal from the Pan-Ameri-
can Exposition at Buffalo, where a coverlet made by Mrs. Mary

118 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Anderson (Jackson County) and some other Berea weavings
were shown as part of the exliiblt of the National Arts Club of
Xe\v York; and in 1904 a third medal from the Louisiana Expo-
sition in St. Louis. In 1907 Berea's Fireside Industry furnished
aE the curtains, rugs, table covers, and hangings for the Ken-
tuck} 7 Building at the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition.

When Mrs. Candace Wheeler, a textile expert from the East,
visited Berea in 1902, she advised that Berea College find a
woman with two necessary qualifications, weaving skill and
business ability. Mrs. Hill saw that the time had come when
some of the young women in her Domestic Science Department
should be taught to weave in order that they might be pre-
pared to take the good positions now opening to trained weav-
ing teachers. She wrote in 1909: "I hope my successor will be
a practical weaver who can teach half a dozen girls to weave.
At present the older weavers are very jealous of their art." 17

It was not until 1911, nine years after Mrs. Wheeler's advice
was given, that a woman was foundMrs. Anna Ernberg, who
knew both the art of textile handicraft and how to buy and
sell. Within a year of her coming she had student apprentices
weaving and earning under her direction.

THE BRICKMAKING and tilemaking industry grew out of the
needs of the farm. Professor Mason insisted that what the
unpromising college land needed was drainage. In June, 1901,
President Frost reported: "The cost of tile is so great that we
have felt like waiting until the farm could undertake the manu-
facture of brick and tile for its own use/' Then the gift of $500
for an engine led the administration to undertake such produc-
tion at once with student labor. By autumn, 1901, a brick plant
had been set up and was able to produce excellent brick; but
the superintendent had found that the clay was not good for
making drainage tile. The following January (1902) the col-

Labor for Education 119

lege Cliape! burned to the ground, and In the plans which were
soon made for a new Chapel, brickmaking became more impor-
tant than tileniaking. By June of 1902 President Frost reported
that the brick and tile plant was furnishiBg employment to
thirty-three students. The brickmaking industry served as a
student industry for about ten years. The need that labor in
the brickyard should be continuous made it a difficult form of
labor for students to cany except during summer vacation.
Another factor that hurt the young brick industry was the high
cost of freight on coal and bricks. Local coal was not then
mined commercially near Berea, and the long distance of Berea
from the mines in Bell and Harlan counties put Berea-made
bricks at a disadvantage in competition with those made in
southeastern Kentucky. "If we could secure reasonable freight
rates, we could sell all we could make/' the discouraged super-
intendent of the brickyard wrote in 1905. 18

Soon after the Chapel burned, a foreman of stoneworking
and bricklaying was employed to teach apprentices. Boys in-
tending to pursue long college courses were encouraged to take
the apprentice course so that they could earn three or four dol-
lars a day in the summer by plying their trade out in the state.
For the next fifteen years most of the bricklaying on permanent
college buildings and in town was done by these students. In
the summer of 1907 Berea student bricklayers and stoneworkers
were employed in construction of the new State Capitol at
Frankfort. When they returned to college in the autumn, they
created a sensation because they were so devoted to education
that they were willing to give up four dollars a day at Frank-
fort for the sake of returning to their books at Berea! 19 After
1908 no bricklaying class was taught for several years. With a
return of college building in 1915-1916 bricklaying classes were
again taught in three successive winters, and that was the end
of student bricklaying in Berea College.

The building of the Phelps Stokes Chapel in 1904-1906 was
another landmark in Berea's labor history. Soon after the old
Chapel was burned to the ground, Miss Olivia Phelps Stokes

120 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

of Xew York offered to pay for an adequate permanent Chapel
on condition that it should be constructed by students. She
accompanied her offer with a check for $500 to help in building
a much-needed Industrial Trades Building for the training
which must precede the Chapel project.

This 840,000 Industrial Building was the first permanent
building erected on the campus since Lincoln Hall was built
almost twenty years before this time. The woodwork section
was equipped with various new machines, thirty benches for
sloyd, rooms for freehand and mechanical drawing, and an agri-
cultural lecture room. Although it was called the Men's Indus-
trial Building, certain women's industries sewing, cooking, and
laundrywere accommodated in the front section. A knitting
miU was to have been established on the third floor, but so
great w r as the demand for men's housing that the idea of a
knitting industry was dropped and the space used for a men's
dormitory.

The visitor who looks at Phelps Stokes Chapel today cannot
realize the cost in effort required to construct that structure,
characterized predominantly by stately simplicity. For ex-
ample, as the campus had no central heating plant when the
Chapel was built, a sawmill boiler had to be placed in the
basement to furnish heat. Therefore the north end of the base-
ment had to be made deep enough for this boiler, even though
students must use hand drills and picks for the excavation.
The boys at the brickyard required much water each day for
their brick manufacture. Since the pipes for the new college
waterworks were only in process of being laid to the Ridge,
the brickmaking for the Chapel was done with well water that
was pumped by an engine set up in the brickyard. The build-
ing, 150 feet long and 83 feet wide, required much construction
material. Students cut the lumber from the college forest and
set it to dry. Other students hewed stone from rocks twelve
miles south of the Ridge.

The bricklaying students laid the walls in strong Flemish
bond. Construction students under the eye of Superintendent

Labor for Education 121

Josiali Burdette wrestled with problems of the roof, and took
special pride in building the bell tower which crowned the
building. The beautiful oak panels of the walls and ceiling
were made in the Industrial Building and carried on young
men's shoulders to the Chapel, to be put in place piece by piece.
The moldings and railings, too, were made in the Industrial
Building by trained student hands. That building, like the Stu-
dents' Job Print, is a historic creation of the labor system.

Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers, who had seen the first board Chapel
erected, laid the cornerstone of the new brick Chapel For the
day of dedication the portraits of the founding fathers were
hung upon the walls, thus in a sense uniting the past with the
future. The first professor, J. A. R. Rogers, made the prayer of
dedication, his last public service for the college which he had
helped to found before the Civil War.

While the Carnegie Library, erected in 1905-1906, was not
built to any great extent by student labor, some of the beauti-
ful oak equipment was constructed by student cabinetmakers
in the woodwork shop, including oversize tables that even to-
day do not show their age and finely finished cabinets with
many drawers which after fifty years of use and weather still
react to the lightest touch.

The librarian at the time when the library was moved from
its old location in Lincoln Hall to the new building was an
exceptionally ingenious and successful labor supervisor. Her
outstanding tactical success was in moving her library from
the second floor of Lincoln Hall to the new stone building two
hundred feet to the west. With her Dutch ingenuity Miss
Eupheinia Corwin devised a neck yoke having double hooks
for holding books, and had enough of these yokes made for an
emergency crew of young men carriers. On the morning of
moving day the students moved a library of twenty thousand
books, and this valiant supervisor wrote in her report: "There
was absolutely no confusion, and when the dinner bell rang, the
books were on the new shelves in exactly the same order as
when they stood on the old shelves at breakfast time." 20

122 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Before 1902 the dormitory students were expected to fur-
nish their own sheets, bedcovers, pillow slips, and towels, but
in that year the College began to furnish all bedding for the
students' rooms, and included the cost of washing this college
equipment in the price of room rent. For performing this serv-
ice a laundry was established, at first located in the basement
of Ladies' Hall, but later in the Industrial Building when that
place was ready for occupancy.

It was taken as a matter of course that the home economics
teachers would manage this new industry, for were not washing
and ironing a woman's function? At the close of her first year's
experience in laundry supervision, Mrs. Jennie Lester Hill of
the Home Economics Department said in her annual report
that she had undertaken this laundry work with about as much
idea of the management of a steam laundry as of an armored
cruiser. 21 After ten years of struggle with complicated laundry
machines, the lady teachers of the home arts gladly turned the
laundry over to Clare Canfield with the frank admission that its
management was a man's job. Ever since that time it has been
understood that the college laundry is not an adjunct of the
Home Economics Department.

President Frost in his first report to the trustees and faculty
(1893) had urged that the College should set up a factory to
enable students to earn ten or twelve cents an hour. At the
close of twenty years after this report no such factory existed in
Berea as yet. Student labor was largely performed to service
the College in some way farm, garden, and forest work, janitor-
monitor-porter duty, library and office work, boarding hall
duties, brickmaking and bricklaying service, laundry work,
nursing at the hospital, servicing the heat and power plant, and
student teaching.

In the summer of 1906, the year in which the Chapel was
dedicated, the catalog announced that all students must share
in the necessary labor of the school, but that no student would
be required to do more than seven hours of college labor a
week, and that the institution could not promise even as much

Labor for Education 123

as this in the winter term. It was the first time that all students
had been required to take a share in the school's labor. If
work was so scarce that labor could not be promised for the
winter term, then why did the College requisition the labor of
students who did not wish to work? Because now that Berea
was no longer biracial, its reputation as a good college where
expenses were low attracted a considerable number of students
who objected to labor. There was as yet no "out-of -territory"
policy to limit the number of students coining from outside the
mountain area. The new labor rule was intended to keep the
campus socially democratic, so that there would not be two
classes: the many who had to work in order to go to college,
and the few who had parents of means. Both the value and
the dignity of labor were sustained by this seven-hour rule.

The faculty's annual reports to the president at the end of
the first year after passage of this rale bristled with comments.
The Normal Department was especially irritated by the labor
rule because its students were older and resented compulsion.
Vocational Dean Miles E. Marsh suggested that many of the
faculty would have to be educated to the value of labor when
it is well done before good results could be obtained from the
labor rule. In 1917 the seven-hours-a-week clause was changed
to ten hours a week, and there it has remained to the present
time.

VI

CERTAIN OF THE NEW vocational courses introduced early in
President Frost's term of service, such as agriculture, carpentry,
and cooking, were taught in part by the apprenticeship method,
and others, such as printing and bricklaying, were taught
entirely by practical work without regularly scheduled classes
for study. When Professor Miles E. Marsh was made Vocational
dean in 1908, he found that part of his new work was to super-
vise the work of apprentices. As there was no supervision over
labor as a whole and no Labor Department, he realized that as

124 Berea's First Century, 1355-1955

Vocational dean lie was unofficially a dean of labor. He took
his work in tills capacity very seriously, and in his annual report,
June, 1910, he listed some results that student labor should
achieve:

1. To carry on the institution's necessary work in such a
way that the College would not lose money because of ineffi-
cient labor.

2. To make labor a useful laboratory for students in their
fields of greatest interest.

3. To discover through work the interests and latent abili-
ties of the younger students barely out of elementary school.

This year, because he considered that it was inefficient for
a student to work a single period, especially at such labor as
milking, fencing, bricklaying, laundering, or construction, Dean
Marsh secured passage of a rule that a student's schedule
should be so made that he could work two consecutive hours
each day. 22 Many times he expressed his preference for a half-
day labor period, but this proved impossible to plan for stu-
dents taking a full course of studies. The problem of avoiding
the single-hour labor period has troubled labor superintendents
from that day to this.

In 1914 the duties and service possibilities within the labor
system became so urgent that Professor Marsh gave up the
administration of the Vocational Schools and became de jure as
well as de facto dean of labor, though retaining his office as
registrar, which he could handle through a capable assistant
registrar. The registrar's report for 1914-1915 showed that
among the sixteen departments of "Productive Labor/' that is
to say, student labor departments, the highest seven as em-
ployers of students were: boarding hall, 263; janitor service, 92;
laundry, 82; agriculture, 72; horticulture, 63; office work, 51;
and woodwork, 44. The four departments employing the small-
est numbers of students were wood sawing, 7 (but this depart-
ment had used 27 student sawyers in the preceding fall term
when preparing the wood supply for winter); weaving, 2; and
Boone Tavern, and power and heat, each one. The only depart-

Labor for Education 125

ments producing for outsiders were Fireside Industries and
Boone Tavern. The work of 1915 was almost completely what
we call today institutional labor.

In 1915 Dean Marsh thought of retiring from the Berea
\vork and settling on a southern farm. He was a very earnest
and hard-w T orking man, stem in manner, but burning with zeal
to help the ambitious student who had very little money for an
education. He feared that Berea was about to close the door
on the poor boy by letting student expenses for amusements
and minor personal luxuries raise the cost of living needlessly.
"I have no interest whatever in a school that is organized for
the well-to-do and the rich, no matter how cultured and moral
the atmosphere," he wrote austerely. "I have learned most
fully what a man has to contend with in trying to establish an
organization that is favorable and will remain favorable to poor
boys and girls." 23

Having been assured of the president's support, Dean Marsh
worked three more years as dean of labor; but in each report
that followed this crisis of 1915 he reiterated his fear that the
faculty was out of sympathy with student labor.

The greatest service performed by this first dean of labor
was to discover and state the important problems involved in
student labor at that time, though he was unable to solve them.
After Dean Marsh's resignation became known, one of the
deans wrote in his annual report, 1918: "It is my belief that we
have reached a very critical time in the development of Berea's
student labor. It must either be organized on a firmer basis or
degenerate into complete confusion. No other man will ever
hold together the system that we are trying to operate as Dean
Marsh has done/' 24

VII

THE NEXT DEAN of labor, Dr. Albert G. Weidler, was able to
build an improved system that saved Berea's labor program.
Dean Weidler was a kindly, scholarly man with a rare gift for

126 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

organization. This brilliant young executive had earned his
Ph.D. before he was thirty; and now before he was forty, he
set his hand to the work to which he would devote the best
years of his life. At the close of his administration as dean of
labor, 1950, all Berea's labor superintendents signed an award
which they had voted for him: "Albert Greer Weidler has
shown good character, fidelity, and skill, and has during thirty-
two school years as Dean of Labor earned the esteem of his
colleagues by his resourceful leadership, his sympathetic alert-
ness to student needs, and his promotion of labor as an essential
of effective education."

In his first annual report, 1919, Dean Weidler emphasized
two ideas. One was that the remaking of the tottering "labor
program lay in the Labor Conference which he had set up, an
organization of the labor superintendents, who met once a
month to study their problems and pool their ideas. These
labor managers, men and women, needed a leader and a com-
mon helpmate; the dean of labor needed their support and
practical wisdom. For thirty-two years his strength lay in the
fact that his own creative planning was tested and sustained
by these superintendents who guided the productive industry
of the students. When he spoke strongly to the administration,
he spoke not as a lone man. When he spoke with feeling to
the teaching faculty of the College, he spoke as one of the
best-educated professors on the college staff.

The second idea that he emphasized in his 1919 report was
the need for more student work, so that the rule requiring labor
of all students could be enforced. The poor enforcement of
the required-labor rule was due in large part to the shortage
of college work, especially in the winter when the attendance
was greatest. When Dean Weidler came to Berea, 1918, seven-
teen productive industries were listed in the registrar's report,
ranging from agriculture to woodwork. By the close of Dean
Weidler's second year, 1920, the list of productive industries
had grown to thirty. Among the new industries was a men's
stabilizing industry, broomcraft, which manufactured brooms

Labor for Education 127

not for the institution's immediate use but for the outside
market. When jobs on the campus were scarce, this industry
could operate at top speed in broommalang; and when more
labor was needed at the boarding hall, on the farm, or at Boone
Tavern, as in time of low registration or an epidemic or war,
brooincraft could go into low production, thus stabilizing sup-
ply and demand.

In the middle of the year 1919-1920, Dean Weidler was
able, through the support of his young Labor Conference, to
put into operation an improved system of awards. "This/' he
said, "lias done more than any other one thing to raise the whole
tone of student labor. ... It helps the student to see the relation
of his work here to his work in life. We plan to use this labor
record as the testimonial of character when such is asked for."
These awards were given for two or more school years of
service in any one department of labor, and testified to the stu-
dent's proficiency, reliability, and length of service. 25 The first
grant of these awards was made on May 20, 1921, to 134 stu-
dents, who sat for the occasion in the front seats of the Chapel.
This was really the first Labor Day in Berea, though the name
had not yet been applied to it. These 134 students constituted
about 6 per cent of the total enrollment, 1920-1921, exclusive
of the Summer School registration and the children of the
Training School.

At the close of the third year of labor awards 207 such
awards were given, and the day was distinguished by the dis-
tribution of printed programs giving the names and depart-
ments of those receiving awards. This year the recipients com-
prised about 9 per cent of the total enrollment. Every year
since 1921 Berea College has given these papers to especially
worthy students, and 449 such certificates were awarded in
1954, the number comprising 29 per cent of the total enroll-
ment. Many students upon going into the world to seek their
first employment have discovered the value of these labor
awards, since they could apply as experienced workmen rather
than as "green hands/'

128 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

In 1935 a new type of award was given by the Labor De-
partment in addition to the labor award for two years or more
experience in the same field of work. The new vocational award
was given to students doing four or more years of service with
a minimum of one year in each of four related fields of work.
This plan gained considerable popularity in its first years, reach-
ing a peak in 1941 when 110 such vocational awards were
given; but in the following years fewer students followed the
new plan, even though it was modified so that one could receive
such a certificate for work in any four departments. One reason
for the decline in favor was the fact that when a student
changed after a year's work from one department to another,
he suffered some loss in pay rate because he began as a new
hand, though scholastically he might be an upperclassman.

Since 1930 another type of award has been given, the Dan-
forth Creative Effort prizes, given by Trustee William H. Dan-
forth of St. Louis, to make Berea's labor more educational by
challenging students to think how college work could be done
more efficiently, with less danger, or with more market appeal.
The prizes are in money; and when the president calls the win-
ners to the platform to receive their prizes, there is sure to be
lusty applause from the audience.

Since 1926 it has been the custom to celebrate the day of
labor awards with both an address and a series of contests. The
Labor Day speakers over the years have been of aid not only
in giving prestige to the occasion, but also in interpreting the
social and educational significance of labor in a college pro-
gram. Among these speakers in the course of the years have
been included two governors of Kentucky, one governor of
Ohio, two managers of T. V.A., an acting secretary of the United
States Department of Labor, an administrator of the National
Youth Administration, a director of the Harmon Foundation,
an outstanding lecturer on problems of labor and management
in Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration, three
executives of great business corporations, and the president of
a nationally known firm of consulting engineers in manage-

Labor for Education 129

ment. Occasionally several outstanding students or experienced
alumni have spoken on what labor in Berea has meant to them.
None of these speakers, however, have uttered words of greater
wisdom than did Dean Weidler himself when in 1934 he gave
the Labor Day address on "Labor, Learning, and Leisure."

The first labor procession was added to the day of awards
and addresses in 1926. Dean Weidler in his report to President
Hutchins in June, 1925, had made this suggestion: "I think that
nothing would help the students to see the magnitude of our
work better than by having a procession to the Chapel by labor
departments. Each department could have some sort of a
banner indicating the department, and the students might
wear the costumes which they wear at work."

Immediately the idea captured the imagination of the stu-
dents, and each Labor Day since that time has had its proces-
sion through the campus by way of the University Walk. This
is no such train as the solemn academic procession in cap and
gown which follows practically the same route a few weeks
later. The labor procession is a joyous thing, reminiscent of the
medieval craft guilds. The moving spectacle suggests labor
taking its leisure with robust gaiety before the more serious
speaking, the awards, and the contests take place.

The first labor contests were held in 1923 in the Tabernacle,
then used as a gymnasium, and they were limited to the single
class period customarily used for a lecture. In the next year a
half day instead of an hour was given to the labor activities,
and the time was changed to the afternoon because the cows*
milking time in the morning was 4:30 a.m., too early an hour
for any holiday. Outdoor contests were added this year, to
take place on the athletic field, namely, milking (dairy), and
hitching and sheepshearing (farm). In 1926 the procession,
address, and awards were activities of the morning and the
contests were held in the afternoon. In 1936 the chimes-playing
contest, formerly held at 12:30, was scheduled for 6:30 p.m.,
after the evening meal, and there it has remained to the present
time.

130 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

Among the Labor Day contests, held once a year for more
than thirty years, ten have been selected as samples :

Boone Tavern: sening a meal;

Dental office: denture wax-up;

Fire Department: 2 teams, 5 men each, erecting ladder,
mounting with hose;

Health Department: bedmaking with patient in bed;

Men's weaving: making homespun on fly-shuttle loom;

Music Department: writing manuscript;

Poultry: grading eggs;

Power and heat: pole climbing;

Printing: linotype operation;

Woodwork: stacking and measuring lumber.
Sometimes a zealous new teacher resents the academic loss
of this day for Labor's hearty expression of joy in work; but the
spirit of Labor, the good teacher, sitting invisibly among the
professors adds materially to their accumulated wisdom on
human relations .

By the close of 1954 there were sixty-three organized
departments of labor on the payroll schedule, ranging from
admissions office, agriculture, agronomy farm, to salesroom,
treasurer's office, woodcraft. Some new departments are pro-
liferations, as it were, of earlier departments. The bakery
began as the boarding halTs baker. The farm has become, if
one speak in organizational terms, agriculture, agronomy farm,
livestock industry, poultry industry, garden, grounds, forestry,
dairy, and creamery. Janitors-monitors' service showed the
need for a department of properties. From Boone Tavern grew
Boone Tavern garage. From the college store's lunch counter
grew the student lunch counter and recreation room designated
as Powell Hall. Out of the early woodwork has grown wood-
craft, industrial arts, and the machine shop. Some depart-
ments of labor grew from the need for stabilizing indus-
tries, such as broomcraft, mountain weavers (using fly-shuttle
looms), woodcraft, needlecraft, and the Fireside Industries.
With the great increase of numbers in the College, there has

Labor for Education 131

been an almost incredible increase in student workers in the
offices of deans and other administrators; student laboratory
assistants in physics, chemistry, and biology; assistants in men's
and women's physical education; aides in preschool, and spe-
cialized labor in music, dramatics, and art. The growth of
labor departments making products for the outside market,
Fireside Industries, woodcraft, bakery, candy kitchen, needle-
craft, mountain weavers, and broomcraft, created a need for
customers' service, salesroom, and gift shop as labor depart-
ments.

VIII

No TWO INDUSTRIES have passed through exactly the same
cycle of growth. The life history of the bakery illustrates par-
ticularly well the experiences of a thriving Berea adjunct over
the past half century.

When the Industrial Building w r as built so that Berea boys
might be trained to make woodwork for Phelps Stokes Chapel,
and the laundry was moved from the basement of Ladies'
Hall, more room was made for the Boarding Department; so a
large brick oven was constructed there in 1903. There was no
bakery yet, but only a large oven and a baker who made two
kinds of light bread, as well as cornbread, which he mixed by
hand in a great bowl made from a poplar log.

Ten years later a boy from eastern Tennessee who had been
reading a Berea booklet on How College Students Earn an
Education came into the kitchen on opening day with a student
guide. The baker in charge found an extra apron for the new
boy, who worked the rest of the morning under the baker's
direction. Later in the day it was found that Dean Marsh had
already assigned the new boy to milk cows, but Clyde had
milked all the cows he cared to milk in his young life. The
matron arranged his transfer to the cumbersome mixing bowl
and the brick oven. Clyde made a bad mistake in mixing his
first batch of cornbread, for when the recipe directed the use

132 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

of a cup of soda, lie innocently used a pint cup. That mistake
gave him an understanding of how a green boy feels when he
is learning.

After graduating from the Academy and beginning College
work, he joined the Navy soon after the United States entered
World War I. He meant to go into hospital work in the Navy
because lie planned in the future to enter some medical school;
but at the Hampton Roads base he found that a new naval
bakery was standing idle for want of sufficient bakers. The
young sailor used his Berea baking experience in the new shop
and came out of the war a petty officer, baker first class. In
1921 he came to Berea as assistant to the baker, and five years
later when the older baker was about to retire, Clyde Jones
was sent on a six-months fellowship to the American Institute
of Baking in Chicago for special training, just as though he
were a promising young instructor in physics or history. From
that time to the present he has been the superintendent of the
bakery, too busy to study medicine. Like an ambitious pro-
fessor, he has kept up with advances in his field, becoming a
member of the American Society of Baking Engineers and
attending annual meetings of the American Bakers' Association,
always realizing that he worked in a technical and highly com-
petitive field where, to use Chaucer's words: "The lyf is short,
the craft so long to leme,/Th ? assay so hard, so sharp the con-
quering/' In Berea he heard persistent talk about the need for
more opportunities in which to use student labor. Instead of
bringing in a new industry, he made plans to expand his old
industry by developing new markets and new products.

Under the wings of the bakery tea-sugar decoration and
candy making came in to absorb surplus labor of student girls.
A friend with a creative imagination showed to Mr. and Mrs.
Jones a small box of tea sugars which she had received as a gift.
They were overdecorated in an uninteresting design by a heavy
hand. Mrs. Jones and her friend saw the possibility of creating
beautiful party sugars by hand-decorating them with delicate,
recognizable designs. Soon there were student girls who be-

Labor for Education 133

came very skillful in tea-sugar work. Mrs. Jones in her own
small home experimented with nut candies, in those days
weighing out the requisite quantities on her baby's scales. The
candy kitchen, which had grown up inside the bakery, by the
end of five years (1937) was employing fifty-seven girls to
make fruit cake, beaten biscuits, candy, and cookies, besides
hand-decorated tea sugars.

Every labor department in the College was seriously af-
fected by the Second World War, and the bakery was no
exception. It normally employed about the same number of
men and women students, the men being slightly in the
majority. When the war came on ? the men students month
after month were called into service. Young women were used
for some of the men's work in the bakery; but much of it was
too heavy for young girls, and nonstudent labor was hard to
find, especially such labor as would fit into a food industry.
The rationing of the ingredients essential to a bakery, the
shortage of sugar, fats, egg yolks, chocolate, cinnamon, cello-
phane, and wax paper, and the shift to enriched breads made
it hard to plan either a production or a sales program. These
problems were intensified by the difficulty in replacing worn
parts in the bakery machinery. The candy kitchen, largely a
girls' industry, suffered more from rationing and raw material
shortages than from any lack of labor. Because of sugar short-
age the girls for more than two years were unable to decorate
tea sugars and made very little candy. They ran part time on
decorated jellies, beaten biscuits, and cookies. The wartime
problems of a college with student industries were difficult
indeed.

For many years the superintendent of the bakery has been
interested in the educational experience of the students under
his direction. He has emphasized the social responsibility of
his workers for the food that would be used by thousands of
people, and for years he has been giving his experienced stu-
dents assignments to train new students for work in the plant.
He encourages his students to report ideas for better safety

1S4 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

practices, timesaving devices, and new products, and teaches
them that attitude is at least as important as skill. He does
not expect to turn out many professional bakers in the course
of the years, but a continuing succession of better citizens.

IX

WILSON A. EVANS in 1950 was appointed dean of labor. He
has inherited a good organization and a priceless tradition. He
worked in this labor program as a student for six years and as
a labor supervisor for five years, when he was the alumni secre-
tary. He took special training in personnel administration in
Teachers' College, Columbia University, and wrote his doctoral
dissertation on the educational values of the Berea College
work program. Besides, he is a man of great patience, courtesy,
and human sympathy.

This first century of "labor and learning" in Berea College
has been attended by many problems. Some solutions have
come through the inventions of dexterous men who never
heard of Berea's work program, some through wearing con-
ferences in Berea's offices, some through wartime experience,
and some through sheer patience. Some urgent problems have
not been solved, but at least they have not been left unstudied.
To forsake such a labor program because of its irritating prob-
lems would be a betrayal of priceless educational experience
in social democracy.

The problem of how to supervise student labor is the most
pressing labor problem in Berea today. Already in 1894 it was
a serious problem when President Frost wrote: "I do not think
anybody in Berea has ever made a study of supervising, and
yet we have a great deal of it to do, and ought to do more. It is
a kingly art and one which there is a great pleasure in exer-
cising, to transform the unskilled apprentice into the efficient
workman." 26 A good supervisor on the campus today with a
clear program of procedures soon trains an unskilled student

Labor for Education 135

into a productive worker without arousing resentment from Ms
corrections; a careless supervisor or one who feels resentment
that he must perform his duties with inexperienced help soon
taints the student with irritation. Of course, a good printer
may not be fitted to supervise; an excellent hospital technician
may exasperate each student who comes within sound of her
voice; and an excellent weaver may find it harder to direct the
labor of student girls than to weave with her own hands the
most intricate pattern of double weaving.

Another problem is the adjustment of labor to the class
schedule. In most forms of work the superintendent finds that
the fifty-minute academic hour is too short a work period,
especially if the student must change his clothes or wash up
within that time. Yet it may be difficult to make a student's
schedule of college courses and still preserve a place for two
consecutive hours of work. Many a student has found a solu-
tion for his labor troubles in a janitor's job, since janitor work,
though it may seem the least interesting of tasks, is usually done
after classwork in a room is ended.

The Berea work policy includes the idea that drudgery has
no great value per se. If laborsavers by their introduction bring
to an end some college jobs, the College will face the problem
and provide some other work. Time was when sawing wood
for college furnaces and stoves employed many men students,
but central heating has long since eliminated the work of the
sawyers. Class bells are now under electric control; so no bell
ringer leaves his classes five minutes early to do his hourly
labor. Janitors are no longer responsible for putting out campus
fires by means of their water buckets. Instead, a preferred form
of labor for a few spirited young men is to ride on the two red
fire trucks and operate the up-to-date fire-fighting equipment by
which both the College and the town are protected. The cows
are milked by machine, the college store uses cash registers,
and needlecraft uses electric sewing machines.

The labor program has had to keep pace with the increase
in Berea's enrollment and with the increasing emphasis upon

136 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

the College Department. In the early days when no student
industries had been set up, the College simply offered Institu-
tional work, as much as was possible. This work was o two
sorts: first, collegiate service such as library work, assistance in
laboratories, and ringing the college bell; second, house work,
such as janitor service, mixing bread for the boarding hall, and
pumping water to the fourth floor of Ladies' Hall. Almost all
the college labor of today has grown from those two types of
institutional work.

Student labor still shelves books in the library and still
cleans classrooms, but the boarding hall's baker now has an
adjunct of his own, the bakery, which bakes the college bread,
and some extra. In fact, many of the college industries, while
performing indispensable services for the College, have en-
larged their facilities for production because of the desire of
people outside the College to share in college services and
products. The laundry, the power and heat, and the dairy
illustrate such enlarged production. Certain adjuncts are es-
sential for teaching agriculture, such as the poultry farm, the
livestock farm, and the garden; but they too produce essential
products for the College and for others. Some students secure
a desirable cultural experience from such an industry as wood-
craft, which sprang from the old woodworking department, and
from the new pottery, which still rests under the wing of a
teacher in the Art Department. Finally, there are certain in-
dustries, such as needlecraft, which were begun as stabilizing
industries to absorb student labor when other types of campus
work were unusually scarce.

To READ SOME of the things that hard-working Berea students
of the past fifty years have said about their "labor for learning"
is to find reassurance that the effort put upon Berea's labor
program has been worthwhile, even though new problems

Labor for Education 137

spring up before the old ones have been quite solved. While
it is in the classroom and the college Chapel that the serious
student becomes devoted to great ideas for the rest of his life,
the place of his labor is likely to be where he becomes habit-
uated to social responsibility and drawn to new interests that
enrich all his mature life.

It was in her Labor Day address, 1952, that a senior said:
"I began my student labor as a waitress in Boone Tavern. Some
of my campus friends are janitors; some are gardeners; some
are weavers; some are typists; and some are making dough at
the Baker} 7 . . . . The way we do a job is more important than
the job because it indicates answers to so many of the questions
that future employers want to know about us." 27

A young man wrote on February 16, 1912: "I have been
thinking what Berea has been to me. When I first heard of
Berea, it was to me as a dream that was about to come true or
a long wishful prayer that was about to be answered, for I had
long hoped that there was some place where a young man
could get an education regardless of his financial situation. . . .
I have learned to do my part and trust in Berea College, and
Berea College trusts in God, so I need feel no uneasiness about
the rest. Some young men think they cannot work and do any
good in school . . . but I say from experience he does not know
how to enjoy life and make his joy pay him in dollars and
cents." 28

In 1928 a lad with fifty-one cents in his pocket stepped off
the bus in Berea and inquired for the "Berea College school-
house." He spent three years in the Academy and four in the
College, earning almost half of his school expenses through
literary and oratorical prizes, and the rest through campus
labor. When he was close to graduation in 1935 he wrote:
"I like to feel that I have been living in a fairly normal way,
instead of getting a theoretical preparation for living. Berea
College, with its work for everyone, is a whole community in
itself, and this fact simplifies our adjustment to the larger
community of the outside world." 29

138 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

A graduate of the class of 1925, who has become a pro-
fessor In an outstanding medical school, wrote in 1938: "While
at Berea I enjoyed the privilege of working with Mr. Fielder
[garden], Mr. Goudey [painting], and Mr. Osbome, spending
four years with Mr. Osbome and his associates ... in the
Treasurer's Office. To me this attitude toward work, that is,
any task however menial or hard, when well done, Is an honor,
and the association with these men are by far the greatest
things that Berea gave to me." 30

Finally from a young woman who will graduate from the
College In 1955: "The next afternoon I went to work In the
College Store. Everyone was busy, but each person took time
to show me the things I would need to know. Those first days
were a mass of confusion, but gradually I learned the pattern
of doing tilings. ... I shall never forget the time I sold a cus-
tomer a fifteen-cent paint brush and then put the whole box of
four dozen brushes into her package. I went home that after-
noon wishing Td never have to return. ... I lived that down
in a few weeks. My labor experience has helped me grow
toward maturity. The people who know me are not my room-
mates, nor my teachers or classmates, but the people with whom
and for whom I work." 31

XI

DEAN WEIDLER in his Labor Day address of 1934 quoted these
words from Rabbi A. H. Silver: "Man must have more than one
world in which to live. . . . Alongside of his job-world he must
construct for himself a leisure w r orld wherein he can live freely
and joyously in the role of a creative amateur, pursuing objec-
tives not out of economic necessity but because of his sheer
love for them. This will enable him to remain young amidst
the ageing toll of relentless years." 32

Next door to broomcraft's building there is a brick building
known as the Westervelt Shop, named from the friend in Texas

Labor for Education 139

who gave the building in hope that it might be a place where
students would go in leisure time to do handwork not for credit
and not for pay, but for the sake of learning how to make things
for their homes. 33 The equipment now includes fine power
tools as well as hand tools. While some secondary classes for
credit are held there in the daytime, the shop is open even-
ings for extracurricular work. Faculty and students, men and
women, work there in spare time while their friends resort to
the g}Tnnasium or to their gardens. The instructor is always
present to help them with their designs, to guide them in the
use of the machinery, and to show them how to finish their
woodwork until it is "smooth as a minnow's tail/ 7 as he says.
This work place bears witness to the fact that craftsmanship
is at home on this campus without a pledge of pay or academic
credit. Westervelt Shop is for many a person "a leisure world
wherein he can live freely and joyously in the role of a creative
amateur."

CHAPTER

: Financing a
Private College

THE SITE, the boards, and the labor for the one-room district
school that was to become Berea College were contributed by
local men who wanted a school for their community. Cassius
M. Clay showed his interest in the project by mentioning in a
letter to Fee, dated December 18, 1855, that he was sending
twenty-five dollars "to the schoolhouse." Another small gift
for the schoolhouse was contributed by one of New York's out-
standing philanthropists in the mid 1850*s, Gerrit Smith. In
his later years Fee liked to repeat the story of that donation.
When he told Gerrit Smith of the work that he was about to
establish in Berea, Smith replied: "It is impossible. They will
not allow you to establish an antislavery church or school in
Kentucky." "Well," said Fee, "I am going to try." Then Gerrit
Smith said: "Here is fifty dollars to help you try."

The Woolwine tract which the trustees had arranged to buy
before the Civil War and for which Fee had raised most of the
necessary money during the war, and other land on the Eidge
which the trustees had bought at the close of the war became
their first source of income, for they sold building lots to new-
comers who were attracted to the Ridge by the little college.
This income, however, would not begin to satisfy the school's

Financing a Private College 141

need for permanent buildings, current expenses, scholarships,
and endowment.

Six months after the College opened in 1868 at the close of
the Civil War, John G. Fee secured the offer of an endowment
of 810,000 from the executors of the estate of the Reverend
Charles A very, a Methodist minister who had made a fortune
from his investments. The executors proposed to invest the
fund and pay the proceeds to Berea College on certain condi-
tions. The first of these was that the proceeds should be used
by the College "for the purpose of promoting the education and
elevation of the colored people of the United States and Can-
ada." 1 The second condition was that the Berea trustees
should agree that the fund could be withdrawn from them in
three years "if said executors decide that the college is or is
likely to be a failure, or is not carrying out the purpose to
which said fund is by will to be devoted, viz., the education
and elevation of the colored race." 2 Eventually the College
received this money, which became the foundation of Berea's
general endowment.

The Freedmen's Bureau not only provided the money for
erecting the first real college building, Howard Hall, but also
provided tuition scholarships (1870-1874), which were espe-
cially necessary for the newly emancipated freedinen. The
form of this business transaction was that the College sold fifty
such scholarships to the Bureau, "each giving four (4) years'
tuition to the holder in any Department of Berea College.'* 3
The Bureau paid forty dollars for each scholarship, turning
over to the College the sum of $2,000 for them.

Between 1872 and 1876 C. F. Dike and his uncle C. F. Ham-
mond deposited with the American Missionary Association con-
siderable sums of money for Berea College, receiving the in-
terest as annuity payments as long as they themselves lived.
After their death this money, amounting to $30,000, became a
special kind of endowment, for the income could be used only
for tuition scholarships. These became available for students
in 1877. 4

142 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

In the college donation books the A very and the Dike-
Hammoiid funds constituted the main part of what was called
the "'Old Endowment" Bet\veen mid December, 18SO, and
April 23, 1SS1, a period of about four months, the "New Endow-
ment" was raised largely through the efforts of President Fair-
child's oldest son, Charles G. Fairchild, who besides being a
teacher of natural sciences in Berea College for eight years was
an unusually successful part-time financial agent for the Col-
lege. Today his subscription book tells succinctly how the New
Endowment came into existence.

Mrs. Valeria G. Stone was a wealthy woman of Maiden,
Massachusetts, who left her large fortune to educational institu-
tions. She, like Avery, Dike, and Hammond, was in close touch
with the A.M.A. The entry of her gift of $10,000 on December
13, 1880, was followed by this condition; "Already paid to
A.M.A. to be held in trust for Berea College until $40,000 ad-
ditional Is secured." Four men and a family gave $5,000 each,
another person gave $7,500, another $2,500, and the remaining
$5,000 was raised in the last two days, most of it being con-
tributed by two persons who had already given $5,000. Every
man and woman named in this little subscription book as a
donor to the Stone Fund had already given generously to
Berea in past years.

The twelve years after the New Endowment was raised
were critical years in the financing of Berea College, the only
bright spot being Roswell Smith's gift of Lincoln Hall, accom-
panied by his devoted attention to its construction. The decline
in Berea*s financial prosperity was due to causes which are
clearer now than they were at that time.

Many of the first generation of Berea's donors were dead by
the mid 1880's, for example, such men as Gerrit Smith, Lewis
Tappan, and C. F. Dike who had substituted the cause of Negro
education for their prewar antislavery zeal and appreciated
Berea's interracial work. In the 1880's the College was paying
the price financially for having been remiss in making new
friends. Moreover, Berea's relations with the A.M.A. had grown

Financing a Private College 143

less close. In its early days the Association had been supported
by various religious denominations; but when several religious
bodies formed their own home missionary boards, the Associa-
tion's work fell largely into the hands of the Congregationalists. 5
That was why the antisectarian John G. Fee in 1883 declined
to accept a salary from the A.M.A. While the Reverend E. M.
Cravath at the suggestion of the Association was elected to
the Berea Board of Trustees in 1868, his place on the Board
was not filled by an Association candidate after his retirement
in 1879.

In the midst of this static financial condition, Berea's dona-
tions became entangled in a theological web for a few months
in President Stewart's second year. The new president gave his
attention to teaching instead of making an effort to revive old
friendships and find new donors for the institution. He had
been Fee's preference for president, and being a Baptist, he
assented to Fee's latest theological writings. In November of
his second year as president (1891), some anxious persons sent
out a printed statement that Berea College was drifting into
a narrow sectarianism that was offensive to many donors and
was seriously affecting Berea's income. The signers asked that
once more the friends of the College pledge a contribution,
but make their pledges conditional upon the appointment of
two new trustees who would be recommended by the A.M.A. 6
In other words, the donors had been invited to exert pressure
upon the trustees. The Prudential Committee replied by asking
that men cease their agitation until the following June, 1892,
when the regular trustee meeting would be held. The inter-
vening months overflowed with words, both written and spoken,
the wisest of which were probably those of John G. Fee, then
seventy-five years of age, who maintained "that Berea College
should not be held responsible for the utterance of his prin-
ciples as set forth in his Autobiography." 7

The post-Commencement trustee meetings in 1892 lasted
for three days instead of one. The two Association candidates
were elected trustees, President Stewart resigned, and Profes-

144 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

sor William G. Frost of Oberlin was offered the presidency.
The following week the Berea College Reporter gave what was
in a sense the last word in the controversy: "The meeting was

one of unusual interest. The past history of the College, its
present basis and financial condition, and future prospects
were fully discussed. . . While some divergence of views as
to certain lines of policy was found to exist, the meeting
closed with harmonious feeling and unanimous action." 5 A
crisis had passed. A new period in Berea's financial history was
about to begin.

ii

PRESIDENT FROST had little to say about finances in Ms inau-
gural address at the close of his first year in office; but in his
annual report given the following day, June 22, 1893, he uttered
such biting criticism that he had only a few of the milder pages
printed for friends of the College.

He spoke of "an air of dilapidation about the place/' He
remarked that the newcomer was oppressed with a sense of
decadence, although this decline had stolen over the College
so gradually that some people might not be aware of it. He
said that men talked about the work "which Berea lias done/'
as though she were dead and buried. Referring to the fact that
the endowment had not increased for twelve years, he com-
mented that so long a period of standing still meant the dis-
heartening of Berea's entire constituency. He reminded them
that the debt incurred in building the Chapel in 1879 had
never been extinguished, but had increased year by year until
at the time he spoke it equaled a quarter of the entire endow-
ment. He called attention to the fact that the treasurer was
the only man on the staff who knew much about business and
that his business experience was limited to his present field;
nor could the College obtain much financial help from the
trustees since there was not a single man on the Board who
transacted a business of as much as $5,000 a year.

Financing a Private College 145

When lie called upon former donors, lie noticed their cool-
ness, and realized that first of all he must build up a list of new
donors whose interest was in the Berea of the present his
Berea. Yet the past had not quite deserted him, for at his
hardest time a considerable bequest left by a past donor whom
he had never seen relieved the pressure upon him. Fifteen
years later President Frost in a public address expressed his
gratitude when he said: "We should have been swamped in the
panic of 1893 had it not been for the bequest of S6000 from
Joseph H. Stickney." 9 In 1915 he again referred to the emerg-
ency of his first year when he said in reference to this bequest:
"That money we used to live upon. From that good time we
have never been obliged to eat our bequests. All the bequests
since then have gone into permanent things/' 10

In midwinter of the year 1894-1895 President Frost had an
intuition that he ought to call on Dr. D. K. Pearsons, a philan-
thropist who had already made generous gifts to numerous
small private colleges. Without delay President Frost left his
financial work in the East and secured an interview with the
philanthropist in his Chicago home. In the end it was arranged
that a ministerial friend of the doctor would deliver an address
the following Commencement, 1895, and Dr. Pearsons would
accompany him to Berea. This plan would give President Frost
the opportunity to show Berea College to a rich man who was
already interested in college education.

The doctor liked what he heard and what he saw on the
Berea campus, even including the thin potato parings in the
boarding hall kitchen. Commencement afternoon he gave a
short address, at the close of which he handed President Frost
a letter to read aloud. Dr. Pearsons offered to give Berea Col-
lege $50,000 when the College had raised $150,000 for addi-
tional endowment. This was his customary pattern of donation,
intended to encourage other donors to join in strengthening a
college's financial basis. The Commencement crowd in and
around the Tabernacle threw up their hats, yelled, and sang
jubilantly. The band played "Hail Columbia." College boys

146 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

hunted up two long ropes, and after unhitching the span of
horses from the doctor's carriage and fastening the ropes to it,
they themselves pulled the old doctor in a joy ride over the
campus to President Frost's home. Everybody enjoyed this
great day, including Dr. Pearsons. Fifty thousand dollars was
the largest sum of money that Berea had ever been offered,
to say nothing of the additional $150,000 that was in prospect.
Forty-three years after the memorable day an elderly man
wrote to President Frost: "I was one of the boys who hauled
Dr. Pearsons and yourself about town in a carriage when he
gave his first 850,000 to the College/' 11

Because so much effort had to be expended upon raising
money for current expenses, three and a half years passed be-
fore the requisite $150,000 was raised to meet the doctor's
offer. In the latter part of this financial campaign President
Frost taught his wife how to raise money for the College, and
in the last month of the drive she raised $30,000. For the next
sixteen years she was his best financial assistant. The following
selection from a letter to Mrs. Frost while the president was
raising the first Pearsons endowment could be repeated from
any of the first twenty years of his administration, though the
sums grew larger as the years passed: "In the last 30 days have
seen 93 new people and 36 old friends, visited 16 towns, made
15 addresses, sent home $760 while some $400 has been sent
in by people I have seen, secured written pledges for $260 and
verbal pledges for enough more to make up a total of some
$2000. Besides, have made progress with Hospital . . . and
access to Rockefeller, Carnegie, and C. P. Huntington." 12 Four
months after the first Pearsons Endowment Fund came to a
successful close, the old doctor repeated his offer, which was
completed with a struggle in June, 1900.

In 1909 Dr. Pearsons gave $25,000 for building a men's
dormitory, now Pearsons Hall, his gift this time being uncon-
ditional. Later in the same year he made his third endowment
offer to Berea College, this time promising to give for endow-
ment $100,000 when Berea had raised $400,000 of new endow-

Financing a Private College 147

nient money. He had helped more than forty coleges with
gifts of endowment and buildings, but now in his ninetieth
year he chose Berea for his final donation, emphasizing in his
offer the fact that he was particularly impressed by "the faith-
fulness which its officers had shown in the care of endowment
funds." He closed his letter with the words: "I can think of no
place where my last gift to colleges will be so well invested as
there." 15 At this time President Frost was too much broken in
health from his work in raising the Adjustment Fund to carry
on another financial campaign, but the trustees took the burden
upon their shoulders, and by the time the president returned
from a year's rest in England, the J. S. Kennedy bequest of
850,000 and Mrs. Kennedy's promise of $250,000 had been
made, so that the entire endowment was soon completed. By
Frost's twentieth year in office (1912) the college endowment
had been increased from $100,000 to $1,000,000.

From the time of his coming to Berea President Frost had
pressed hard for more students, and the growth from 354 in
1892-1893 to 1,423 in 1912-1913 greatly Increased the need for
"more pillows and more plates." The more endowment he
secured, the more buildings and donations for current expenses
he needed. He personally wrote much publicity material,
which his office mailed to a growing list of interested people.

He recognized the value of having distinguished persons as
friends of Berea College, such outstanding persons as Theodore
Roosevelt, New York's new police commissioner, who addressed
a Berea meeting in Boston in November, 1896; Mrs. Julia Ward
Howe, who presided over a meeting where Frost spoke ( 1899) ;
Miss Helen M. Gould, who came to Berea with a party of lady
friends to spend the Commencement season in 1900; Andrew
Carnegie, who in 1907 pledged $200,000 to the Adjustment
Fund; and Governor Woodrow Wilson, who in 1911 spoke at a
great meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, for the Pearsons-
Kennedy Endowment Fund.

At the close of his fourth year in Berea (1896) President
Frost wrote to the Berea trustees: "It is a disappointment to me

148 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

and a loss to the school that so much of whatever gifts I have
as an educator must lie unused while I am struggling for cur-
rent expenses." 14 In 1911 at the close of a day in New York
when he had finished mailing four thousand invitations to his
great meeting in Carnegie Hall, he turned to his Berea secre-
tary and said: "Think what will happen when we can work at
the school work and the religious work like this! And really
"the good time coming 3 seems almost here." 15

"The good time coining" had not yet arrived, however. Presi-
dent Frost, his wife, his faithful aide Professor Henry M. Penni-
man, and a new assistant carried on one more financial strug-
gle, an "Efficiency Campaign" to raise a million dollars, half for
additional endowment and half for the construction of perma-
nent buildings for the five segregated departments. The Col-
lege had never before set so great an amount as its goal, and
this time there was no Dr. Pearsons to start off the campaign
with a munificent initial contribution. Hopefully President
Frost sought for a generous grant from the young General
Education Board and the newly founded Carnegie Foundation
through which Carnegie by this time usually gave his dona-
tions for education; but both foundations with courtesy defer-
red a final decision so long that President Frost set out upon
his financial effort without their help.

In place of a large initial gift President Frost arranged a
meeting to be held in the new D.A.R. hall in Washington, with
Justice Charles Evans Hughes as presiding officer and the
President of the United States as the principal speaker. More
than two thousand invitations were issued, in the name of
forty-eight friends of Berea College, including cabinet mem-
bers, senators, distinguished ministers of various denomina-
tions, and outstanding businessmen. After Justice Hughes,
President Frost, Professor Frederick G. Bonser of Columbia
University, and Hamilton W. Mabie of the Outlook had given
their interpretation of Berea's work, President Woodrow Wilson
made his appeal for Berea College. His words, spoken in
Berea's sixtieth year, form a memorable part of Berea's treas-

Financing a Private College 149

tired past the democratic ideal of Fee and Clay restated for
a new generation of Americans. Wilson said that lie was not
speaking in Ms official capacity of President of the United
States, but because of <c his profound interest In Berea College."
Presently lie said: "Our nation Is not fed from the top. It Is not
fed from the conspicuous people down. It Is fed from the In-
conspicuous people up; and the Institutions like Berea that go
into the unexhausted soils and tap their virgin resources are the
best feeders of democracy /* 16

The meeting received excelent publicity, but the harvest
did not come until the following year (1916). An incredible
number of calls and addresses were made to raise this Fund.
Eventually Carnegie out of Ms personal friendship for President
Frost made a conditional pledge of $63,000, a sum which was
so figured as to make him the donor who had pledged the
largest total sum to Berea College up to that time. It was very
exciting to receive now the promise of a dormitory, now a new
home economics center, now the money for a new hospital
building, and now $40,000 for the endowment of mountain
agriculture. A million dollars, however, is a very large sum of
money to raise, and by the fall of 1916 Mrs. Frost was too near
exhaustion to continue her work. President Frost, too, was
drooping in health, but he continued at his work until early
December, 1916, when he collapsed in New York. One hun-
dred thousand dollars was yet to be raised. As some of the
pledges had January 15, 1917, as their terminal date, he con-
tinued his work by mail and telegraph from his office in Berea.,
and by January 15 the goal of the Efficiency Fund was reached
at least in pledges. President Frost never fully recovered from
this overejffort.

in

CERTAIN GIFTS create in their donors an unusual glow of satis-
faction. Such was the case with the college forest reserve and
the college waterworks. Professor Mason, a forest expert, ac-

150 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

companied the students on their all-day picnic to Indian Fort
Mountain Ills first autumn in Berea ( 1S9T) . He saw the breath-
taking views from East and West Pinnacle, explored Indian
Fort, and made up his mind that the College ought to possess
a forest for two reasons: first, to aid In teaching forest care to
his classes; second, to provide fuel and lumber for the College.
During the fall days after this Mountain Day, he rode much
In the forest lands and saw John Kindred's fine spring, about
which he wrote later: "It was then I gained the Idea that this
spring and other springs lay at a considerable elevation above
Berea College and might be piped there by a gravity system of
water works." 17 His interest, however, was more in the forest
than in the springs.

Since the hills were covered with second growth and not
virgin timber, he thought that purchases of many small hold-
Ings could be made at a very low price If the buying were done
quietly. He had much of the forest surveyed under his direc-
tion by a young instructor In mathematics, who also tested the
water flow of each spring. As It was not easy for President
Frost and the trustees to buy forest land when every effort was
being made to raise money for the Pearsons Endowment and
for current expenses at the same time, Professor Mason per-
sonally bought both East Pinnacle and Indian Fort lest they
fall into other hands before the College was ready to buy.

Then one day in 1899 President Frost was invited to call on
a certain Boston woman of property who wished to make an
unusual donation. She had heard of Berea ? s interest in forestry
and wished to buy a forest for Berea College in memory of her
late father, who had dearly loved a well-kept stretch of wood-
land. By 1901 the College possessed eight hundred acres of
forest land, for most of which this woman had paid. In her
letters Miss Sarah B. Fay repeatedly reminded the president
that part of her check was to apply on the salary of the profes-
sor of forestry. When President Frost in a letter made mention
of a tract containing good springs, she replied in an undated
letter: "It seems to me at this distance . . , that it would be

Financing a Private College 151

desirable to secure that tract if really suitable before it is turned
over to some other purpose. 5 ' One day in 1903 she wrote from
her summer home at Wood's Hole: "I sent you $2,000, of
which I think $600 was for salary and the remainder toward
woodland. Take advantage while yon may of my having a
fresh attack of what my father called land fever/ Gifts that
grow are best. . . . Besides, an unbroken tract is so appealing
to a land lover." 18 On a certain January day, year unmentioned,
she wrote to President Frost: "I can probably manage to help
out on that land. ... I feel more like investing in land than in
human nature. I have learned that I know nothing of human
nature and would better stick to trees." She possessed a green
map on which the various tracts, large and small, were indi-
cated. One day in 1903 she wrote: "The tract marked B you
ought to have to fill out, when you can get it. ... I do love a
handsome, well-bounded piece of land now better than a
handsome boy." 19 In 1911 when Berea's forest contained more
than four thousand acres, Miss Fay wrote with a vague desire
for the silent woodland: *Tm just longing to buy those big
oaks that Mr. Penniman can't get a clear title to." 20

After 1900 the annual reports pressed for an adequate water
supply, now that people knew the College owned some moun-
tain springs. Since the trustees in 1902 and 1903 hesitated to
incur the expense of piping water downhill and up again from
springs four miles distant and two hundred feet above the
Berea Bidge, the trustee committee considered the wisdom of
placing a small engine in the bed of Brushy Creek to supply
Ladies' Hall and Howard Hall with water at no great expense.
In August, 1903, Dr. Pearsons wrote to Trustee Cleveland Cady
in New York that he considered water the most important of
all Berea's problems, but that he had so many pledges to pay
the next year that he could not consider a gift of waterworks
for Berea College.

It was Trustee Addison Ballard who took Berea's lack of
water most seriously. He was a Chicago businessman, and a
friend of Dr. Pearsons. In 1902 when the trustees hesitated

152 Berea's First Century., 1855-1955

over the expense of piping spring water from the Mils to Berea 3
he suggested that they could avoid expense by following Chi-
cago's pioneer example. They Blight cut logs out of the forest
and make a four-inch bore lengthwise: "If properly buried,
they will do the work for twelve or fifteen years. Do it all our-
selves and have water and plenty of it without paying any
interest money for drain pipes." 21 Late in 1903 after a trustee
meeting in Cincinnati this tenderhearted trustee from Chicago
wrote to President Frost: ""'There has scarcely been a day that
I have not been thinking about that water supply at Berea, nor
a night that I don't dream of it since I came home from Cin-
cinnati/' 22 Already he had told Dr. Pearsons that he had "no
right to build up a school to the number of a thousand students
and then let them choke to death with thirst/' 23

By this time the Reverend William E. Barton jwas pastor of
a church in Oak Park, near Chicago. He knew the water need
of Berea, and since he was a trustee, he was acquainted with
Addison Ballard. In the fall of 1903 these two trustees, aided
by Mrs. Barton, secured from Dr. Pearsons a secret pledge that
the next year he would provide Berea College with water-
works; 24 and on June 22, 1904, the doctor sent his pledge for
$50,000 to the trustees, adding in the fourth paragraph: "Mrs.
Pearsons and I make this gift to promote the cleanliness, good
health, and permanent prosperity of Berea College., and of the
village, especially the families who have moved there to edu-
cate their children, and of the young people boarding them-
selves/' 25 It was Addison Ballard who dug die first shovelful of
dirt for the water pipes in October, 1904, and Mrs. W. E.
Barton who on Commencement afternoon in June, 1905, at a
hydrant near Lincoln Hall "officially started water flowing upon
the college campus. The student fire company was there in
readiness to give a short display of the height and volume of
the stream of water for fire purposes." 26 Dr. Pearsons often said
that the gift of waterworks to Berea College was the best in-
vestment he had ever made and that "he had never done a
thing in his life that gave him so much fun." 27

Financing a Private College 153

IV

Ix LATE OCTOBER., 1914, President Frost made a special trip to
call on Cliarles M. Hall, first vice-president of the Aluminum
Company of America, hoping to secure 81 5 000 for the Efficiency
Fund. He was disappointed to receive only $500. This quiet
industrial chemist, Charles M. Hall, who had invented an inex-
pensive method of extracting aluminum from clay, had known
about Berea College for many years, for when he was a little
boy back in 1872-1873, his eldest sister had taught in Berea.
Also, he had known President Frost as a Greek professor who
had helped him to make up some Greek lessons one Christmas
vacation in Oberlin. Hall never came to Berea, but he made
donations to the College that ranged from $50 in 1903 to
$5,000 in 1910.

When he sent a check to Berea, he usually accompanied it
with a personal letter to his former teacher. President Frost.
This correspondence is of peculiar interest from the fact that
this Charles M. Hall who never saw Berea donated the largest
block of endowment that Berea has received up to this time
( 1955) . In 1906 he assured President Frost that he was a firm
believer in the importance of Berea's work. In 1910 when he
pledged $5,000 he added in a postscript: "My interest in Berea
College is largely on account of your personality and your work.
I should like to see you again perhaps sometime when you are
in New York, and learn a few things about the college itself." 2 *
A few days later he mentioned in a letter that he had been
greatly interested in the Berea Quarterly, and that he wanted
to ask the president a few specific questions about Berea. In
October, 1912, he wrote: "If I should continue to prosper, I
hope to do more for you in the future." 29 He made no mention
of having written Berea College into his will the preceding
July. In August, 1914, his letter expressed his expectation of
helping Berea in the future, though the war situation had
temporarily embarrassed him. so Hall died on December 27 of

154 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

that same year, 1914. On January 15, 1915, the president noted
in his diary: tk Xe\vs of bequest of Hall, whom I had seen in
October last."

By this will Berea College was left one-sixth of Charles M.

Hall's residuary estate. While this property, consisting largely
of speculative stocks., would not come Into the possession of
the CoMege for a considerable number of years, some income
from It might be expected within a few years. Such Income
began to be paid to Berea in 1918, $72,000 the first year and
S98 3 000 in each of the two following years.

President Frost feared certain II effects from the prospect
of future payments from the Hall estate. In the last financial
survey of Ms administration he warned the trustees and faculty
of this danger: "The Hall Fund does harm as well as good. It
Is easily assumed that this Income will be permanent, even
enlarged, and should be used not to reach farther into the
mountains, but to embellish and pad our life here in Berea! . . .
We have kept the Hall income separate from our 'chief reve-
nues' to pay debts, erect buildings, and provide for forward
steps. Its first service has been to help meet the extra expense
entailed by the war/' 31

WHEN WILLIAM J. Hutchins became president, he found
Berea College encumbered by a debt amounting to a quarter of
a million dollars. This was a respectable debt, but it was a
debt, nevertheless, and one which In time might hurt the Col-
lege In the eyes of its donors. This debt had not been incurred
for current expenses and It was not an old debt. It had been
made In wartime and when President Frost was in poor health.
This borrowed money had been spent in buying land for col-
lege expansion and In providing much-needed new buildings
and equipment in a period of great expansion of student at-
tendance. A large part of this money had been borrowed from

Financing a Private College 155

college funds, not from outsiders. These college funds, how-
ever, consisted of money that had been given for some future
use other than expansion in land and buildings.

It was assumed that such loans were not undesirable, for
they were more than covered by the wills of friends still living
and by the expectation of continuing income from the Hall
estate. Moreover, the president expected to raise money for
repaying much of this debt from certain "great friends of the
Institution" when he was in a better state of health for pre-
senting the College's needs. 32 Finally, however, the trustees in
their meeting of June, 1919, voted to cut every possible ex-
penditure for expansion.

Five months before President Hutchins took office in June,
1920, the treasurer of Berea College warned President Frost
that the College was following a poor financial system: "Our
expenditures have no relation whatever to our income, and our
attempts to run on a budget plan are more or less of a joke.
We have followed this method of spending money before we
get it, trusting to our prospective bequests, funds we administer,
or our borrowing power, until we have almost reached the
point of disaster." 33

When the Berea trustees' committee urged William J. Hut-
chins, for thirteen years a professor in the Oberlin Graduate
School of Theology, to accept the presidency of Berea College,
they assured him that he was entering upon educational rather
than financial duties inasmuch as the Hall bequest would
doubtless bring to Berea at least the same amount as in the
two preceding years; but in his first summer after taking up
his new duties, President Hutchins found it necessary to join
in signing a personal note in both July and August so that
teachers' salaries might be paid. He learned also that at the
preceding trustee meeting teachers' salaries had been raised
25 per cent, the new rate to begin with September, 1920.

In late August, 1920, a member of the Board of Trustees
wrote to the new president a five-page letter by hand, frankly
explaining the seriousness of Berea's recent method of financing

156 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

expansion and asking for more respect for the endowment and
the budget. To this letter President Hutchins replied with
an earnest letter of appreciation, saying that he agreed with
the idea that bequests should be used only as endowment and
that he welcomed a mandate of the trustees to this effect. He
asked, however, for a short breathing space to extricate the
institution from its "staggering debt." Three days later the
president wrote to one of the oldest and most devoted trustees:

c l wish first to remove the present indebtedness and then I
wish to present to die Board of Trustees the recommendation
that hereafter we shall live within a carefully prepared budget
and use bequests exclusively for endowment and similar pur-
poses. Now ... I need the backing of those trustees who have
been working at the great task during the past years; who
know what has taken place, why it has taken place, and how to
devise ways and means by which we may escape from our
present situation. . . . Personally I am full of hope. I believe
we are working in a deep hole, but a hole which shall prove a
tunnel and not a grave." 34

On the following October 20, 1920, two days before the
formal inauguration of President Hutchins, the Board of Trus-
tees took action providing that the Prudential Committee
should prepare a formal budget, to be presented to the Board
at their annual spring meeting for approval. "After the adop-
tion thereof by the trustees, the budget may not be exceeded
by the Prudential Committee except in special emergencies
when the majority of the Financial Committee shall be re-
quired." In his annual report of 1923 President Hutchins
included a summary of the budget that had been adopted by
the trustees for the year 1923-1924, and this practice of printing
the budget in the president's report has been continued up to
the present time. It is, in a sense, a mark of the respect which
Berea College pays to the endowment and to the principle of a
budget for responsible living.

The $100,000 of endowment held by Berea College in 1892
had increased to $3,500,000 by the close of President Frost's

PHELPS STOKES CHAPEL
Built by student labor, 1904-1906

Photo by Mattson Studio, Berea

o Photo by Mattson Studio, Berea

COOKING CLASSES IN THE 1890's AND TODAY

Financing a Private College 157

administration. Since 1920 this endowment lias been aug-
mented largely through the addition of bequests to it. When
Berea's share of the bequest left by Charles M. Hall at the
time of his death in 1914 was transferred to the College in
1929, it was gradually reinvested in a diversity of securities
which were credited to the endowment. By 1930 President
William J. Hutchins in his annual report was able to state that
endowment funds amounted to a little more than 89,000,000.
In President Francis S. Hutchins 5 first annual report in 1940,
he reported Berea's nonexpendable funds as amounting to about
$10 3 50Q 5 OQO. By 1955 this mainstay of Berea's economic life
amounted to $16,000,000.

The endowment is rightly called the lifeblood of Berea's
financial structure. It takes the place of annual legislative
grants to state colleges and universities, and of Board grants to
colleges under church management. Berea's nonexpendable
endowment is what gives stability to this nonstate, nondenomi-
national college. Since 1920 this fact has been more than ever
recognized and respected by Berea trustees and administrative
staff. The vital function of the nonexpendable endowment in
supporting the existence of Berea College may be realized from
the fact that 70 per cent of Berea's annual income is derived
from endowment, 20 per cent from donations, 2.5 per cent from
laboratory and similar student fees, and the remaining 7.5 per
cent from rentals and student industries.

Strangers often ask why people give so generously to Berea
while they live, and write Berea into their wills, whether their
estate is large or small. The answer was well expressed by
Zenas Crane, Sr., a very generous donor to Berea in the first
half century of Berea's existence. Professor Fairchild had be-
gun to thank him for another gift when Crane interrupted with
the words: "Don't thank me. I thank you and your father from
the bottom of my heart for doing exactly the type of work
-which I want to see done in the South/' 35 These words from a
man who gave by the thousands of dollars apply likewise to
the many donors who for a century have given by the him-

158 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

dreds, the fifties, and the tens, because they believed in Berea's
program of education. The words of these donors show their
desire to be continuing partners in Berea's "allegiance to
humanity/ 3

Bruce Barton in a letter asking for 81,000 for Berea from
each of twenty-four friends expressed in another way the
answer which many people give to the above question : "A couple
of years ago I said: Td like to discover the one place in the
United States where a dollar does more net good than anywhere
else/ ... I believe I have found the place/* After telling about
Berea he continued: "Most of the activities to which we give
our lives stop when we stop. But families go on. And young
life goes on, and matures, and gives birth to other lives. . . .
Honestly, can you think of any other investment that would
keep your life working in the world for so long a time after you
are gone?" 36

Historically Berea's financial support comes from individuals
rather than from the great foundations. The family founda-
tions, however, and the foundations that reflect personal in-
terests have been of very great service to Berea in recent
years, enriching the College with improved equipment, financ-
ing educational projects for an initial period of years, adding to
scholarship funds, providing series of lectures, and giving aid
in emergencies.

VI

BEREA COLLEGE in many ways shows its concern for the finan-
cial life of its students. The cares of the administration would
be lessened if a tuition fee replaced the no-tuition policy of the
College, but even a low tuition charge would defeat the funda-
mental purpose of the institution to bring education within the
reach of promising students who have very limited means.
Every possible effort is made to keep the price of board and
room low, though the boarding halls and dormitories must cover
their operating costs from student payments. The College makes

Financing a Private College 159

emergency loans available at the recommendation of the deans
of men or women. If a student finds it impossible to bring cash
even for Ms first term bill, he may receive a loan from the
College, to be repaid by earnings from his labor. If a student
chooses to stay for full-time labor in the summer or the winter
vacation, he receives a considerably higher rate than during
term time, and also under certain conditions a 10 per cent
bonus upon his summer vacation earnings.

The salaries of Berea's faculty are not large, but at least
they meet the requirements of the Southern Association; and
fortunately there are highly trained teachers in the prime of
their professional life who help to make Berea's no-tuition pro-
gram possible by adding to their modest pay checks the satis-
faction which they find in Berea's educational and social pat-
tern.

Since 1920 the College has added some services which are
especially helpful to the staff. In 1923 the annuity service of
the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association was provided
to the teaching and administrative staff with the College con-
tributing 5 per cent and the staff member the same share of
his salary for a retirement income. Twelve years later the same
service was extended to nonacademic college workers. In 1947
the College made group life insurance available to all college
workers., in 1951 federal social security was introduced, and in
1952 participation in the College Equities Retirement Fund of
the T.I.A.A. was extended to the Berea staff. The College
Credit Union, for which the administration furnishes an office
and part time of a secretary, makes loans on character reference
to the faculty at very reasonable rates. The faculty have the
benefit of low rental if they live in college-owned houses, and
reduced rates for hospital care. A limited number of grants
are made each summer for faculty study and travel, and a
decennial leave of absence for these two purposes is given
with full pay for half a year or half pay for a full year.

Berea's work program necessitates certain activities seldom
recorded in the financial reports of a liberal arts college. Before

160 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

pay-up day every half term each, superintendent of student
labor, the librarian for example, prepares a report from the
student time cards. This shows the total number of hours
worked by each student worker, his rate of pay, which rises
with increased experience, and his total earnings for the past
nine weeks. This report is sent to the labor office to be added
to the student's labor record, and is then transferred to the
treasurer's office for use on pay-up day. The business manager
must order supplies for the dairy and the Fireside Industries as
well as for the library and the registrar's office. Tables of net
loss or gain of the utility adjuncts, for instance broomcraft and
the creamery, must be prepared. In the financial report for the
fiscal year ending June 30, 1954, the schedule of the equipment,
fixtures, merchandise, and supplies for the enumerated utility
adjuncts amounted to a little more than $1,000,000. The
schedule of college buildings in the same report included among
others such buildings as the cannery, the piggery, the trades
building, two imperishable silos, calf barns, brooder houses, a
dry kiln, and a cattle shed. All this and more is essential to the
working of the labor program.

Berea College also has interesting business relations with
the town of Berea. Soon after the College built waterworks in
1905, it began to sell water service to the town, and still with
increased facilities continues to do so. Therefore the income
from water must be included in the fiscal report of the College.
The College holds a twenty-year franchise from the city of
Berea to sell electricity to the city and the citizens. Town and
College share in the same sewer system, though for many years
the College had its own sewer lines. The College and the town
share equally in the cost of the two Berea fire trucks, and they
also share equally in their operating expenses. The College
provides the service and salary of two staff members as fire
chiefs, and the labor and living quarters of young men students
as firemen, while the city pays the College twenty-five dollars
for each call made by the town.

Financing a Private College 161

VII

BEREA COLLEGE before 1S90 might have done well enough
without a Board of Trustees, but since that time trustees have
been absolutely essential to the welfare of the College. The
Board of Trustees of Berea College consists of thirty members
and the college president. These trustees hold office for a
term of six years. The Board is a self-perpetuating body, and
it is accustomed to select new members who shall represent a
diversity of interests. Some are skilled lawyers, a few are
bankers, some are industrial executives, some are educators,
some are ministers of various denominations, and now three are
alumni nominated by the alumni organization. At the present
time ten are from the East, six are from the Middle West east
of the Mississippi River, three are from the trans-Mississippi
West, and eleven are from the South, seven of these being
from Kentucky.

The Board of Trustees holds two meetings a year, one in
New York in the late fall, the other in the spring at Berea.
Much of the trustee work is done by committees, which meet
as suits their convenience during the year. One of the most
important committees is the Finance Committee, which in col-
laboration with the fiscal agent of the College, now the First
National Bank of Chicago, handles the investment securities.
Other important standing committees are those on Student In-
dustries, on Buildings and Grounds, and on Educational Poli-
cies, while special committees are formed to meet particular
situations.

Over the years the trustees have been men of unusual social
conscience, and they give their service to Berea as to a beloved
cause. Most of them have served for several terms and have
gained a deep understanding of Berea's problems. Thompson
S. Burnam said in 1916 in his second term: "As the years roll
by, Berea grips me closer." When William A. Julian, the
treasurer of the United States, died in 1949, he was in his thirty-

162 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

fourth year as a trustee of Berea College; and although the
property which came to Berea from his will was the second
largest bequest ever made to the College, yet the value of his
service as a trustee and especially as a member of the Finance
Committee over a long stretch of years may have been worth
f uUy as much as his final bequest.

No man is elected to the Board of Trustees because of his
wealth. Each trustee shares as he is able in carrying the college
burden, whether by priceless legal advice, by financial service,
by finding new friends for the institution, by defense of a
fundamental principle when it seems to him endangered, by
giving encouragement to a burdened president, or by calling
to mind the importance of spiritual values.

The well-being of Berea College depends not only upon
what is done with the College's endowment, but also upon the
kind of men who are chosen as trustees. President William J.
Hutchins expressed this with clarity in saying to the trustees
when they were considering the election of a new member
to the Board: "I sometimes think of Berea as a beautiful and
precious vase, in which are stored certain spiritual essences,
which, quite without our knowledge, may escape. One day
they may disappear; the vase will be here, all the buildings,
the endowment, the students; but the Berea which you and I
love, and for which we would gladly die, will be lost." 37

CHAPTER O

O: A of

Sharing

FOR A CENTURY Berea College has faced urgent social
needs that have weighed upon its conscience as a community
of faculty, students, and neighbors. For a century it has been
clear that the College would fail of its best intentions if it
were only a recipient and not also a giver. The more freely
Berea College has received, the more strongly it has felt the
duty to give in increasing measure.

From the beginning Berea's "chivalry of education" has
found expression in many outlying communities. This sense
of widespread social needs that the College ought to meet has
always been a source of strength, sustaining the institution in
its hardest years. When this sense of social duty fails, Berea
College as the past has known it, as the present knows it, will
cease to exist; and Berea will be only buildings, books, and
credit.

ii

IN THE EARLY DAYS Berea teachers and students were some-
times invited to mountain communities for the purpose of
organizing a Sunday school which in a superrural area without

164 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

a minister served almost as a church* President Faircbild in
1875 spoke of twenty such Sunday schools having been founded
in a single year in this way, and added that they were organ-
ized largely through the influence of used books brought from
Berea. 1 In 1880 when he spoke of his experience at a neighbor-
ing county seat in establishing a Sunday school which soon
grew to a membership of seventy-five persons, he said that a
good library from Berea had been of great help to him in this
success. 2

These Sunday school libraries were succeeded in the 1890's
by teachers" "traveling libraries/' each one containing from
fifteen to twenty books sent in a wooden box which could be
set up as though it were a bookcase. A student going out from
Berea to teach in a district school would borrow such a library
for a term. Of course no charge was ever made for its rental.
Already in 1897-1898 the college librarian reported that twenty-
one such libraries had been borrowed by outgoing young
teachers.

As time passed, Berea's book boxes were made larger so as
to hold more books, sometimes as many as fifty, and they were
sent farther back into the hill country. As recently as 1933
Berea's extension librarian wrote in her annual report: "The
mode of reaching their destination varies from mail train to
river boat and from private car to mule back. One teacher in
the mountains wrote to ask if she might keep her box of books
a little longer 'until the roads get better, as the mail carrier
has to go on a mule about twelve miles/ A wooden case
containing forty-five books would make quite an addition to the
mule's load of mail!" 3

Thanks to friends who became interested in Berea's exten-
sion work with books, the library presently was able to buy
new books to replace the used books of earlier days. The
librarian's report in June, 1954, showed that the Berea College
library had circulated during the past school year 161 traveling
libraries, containing a total of 6,872 books, and that these
libraries wre placed in the schools of twenty-three counties.

A Century of Sharing 165

The need for this service is suggested by the fact that seventy-
five of these book boxes were placed in one-room schools.
County bookmobiles have not yet superseded Berea's traveling
libraries in schools at the head of the hollow.

For twenty-seven years ( 1916-1943 ) the college library also
shared its resources of books by means of a book wagon or,
later, a book car. Miss Corwin had read of book-wagon service
provided by public libraries in communities of Maryland, Dela-
ware, and Connecticut. Could not the library of a college with
cultural noblesse oblige in its heart set up a similar service for
its timid country neighbors? Miss Corwin secured the gift of
two book wagons one of them built by the dexterous father of
a Berea student as well as a small sum of money for operating
the roadside sendee.

In the early years of this adventure in adult education the
assistant librarian, Airs. Florence H. Eidgway, directed the
book-wagon service in person with the help of student boys
chosen for their ability to handle mules and horses on deeply
rutted roads, their understanding of books for book-famished
people, and their grace in meeting people.

Mrs. Eidgway saved some of the choice words of apprecia-
tion spoken by her patrons. One man upon returning Nicolay's
Boy's Life of Abraham Lincoln jocosely remarked, "I got so
interested I like to have sot up all night reading, and my woman
mighty nigh whupped me." An old lady who on the book
wagon's first trip refused a book because she was too busy
studying "Revelation," compromised later with a book of
Spurgeon's sermons, and finally asked for Ben Hur, though
adding quickly, "But I don't believe much in reading the works
of man." The words of an illiterate woman whose husband
read the library books to her reflect the common appreciation
of the book-wagon service: It's the nicest thing I know, the
way you folks haul around books for us to read."

When this kind of extension work was carried on after 1922
by book car instead of by book wagon, a librarian could cover
more miles and visit more schools than formerly, even though

166 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

her '^bookmobile** was the town taxi with no conveniences for
dispensing books. Although this book-car service became in-
creasingly more concerned with book reading in the rural
schools ? it remained to the last also a means of adult education.

In Mrs. Ridgway's 1926 report she spoke of visiting twenty-
one schools with books and pictures. The time of the book-car
\isits was the school's term from July to Christmas. In this
year the third book-reading contest was carried on during the
entire term, fourteen schools with an approximate attendance
of five hundred children participating in the contest, which
was intended to guide children into desirable habits and tastes.
Also, Home Reading Circles were set up in certain homes, from
which the books circulated. In 1926 Mrs. Ridgway reported
nine circles, with four hundred books from the book car passing
from one member to another.

When Aliss Alice Kirk took up the book-car work in 1931,
she reported visits to twenty-nine schoolrooms, seventeen of
which were one-room schools, making about six calls at each
school during the term. The Berea extension service in 1938
furnished books to nine workers in the W.P.A.'s Pack Horse
Library Project, sponsored by county boards of education. 4
With gas and tire rationing and the shortage of labor in war-
time, Berea's book-car service ceased in 1943 and it was not
revived after the war because much of its work could be done
through traveling libraries and through the extension office in
the Berea College library.

Tliis extension office eventually outstripped in circulation
the book wagon, the book car, and even the traveling libraries,
and occasionally exceeded the circulation of all these services
combined. The first step toward this additional service was the
desire of one of the librarians (1914) for an extension room
where books for the traveling libraries might be kept. Presently
(1916) Miss Corwin secured a "Director of Library Extension,"
with her office in a basement room which had an outside
entrance separate from the students' entrance. She meant to
make it easy for country people to come to the library for

A Century of Staring 167

books during the long months when the book wagon was not
running.

By 1922, when the book-wagon circulation was 8,200, the
extension room charged out 802 books directly. In 1923-1924
the extension library added to its sendee "package libraries"
sent out by mail in response to a direct request, often expressed
in vague terms, such as "some books for my little boys/' or
"a good book about canning and sewing." The extension libra-
rian was kept in good spirits, however, by confidence that this
work was part o "a great vital movement for the betterment of
American rural life/' 5 and this faith seemed justified when the
circulation from the extension room rose to 995 books in 1930,
and 5,183 in 1935, exclusive of book-car and traveling library
service. In the year ending in June, 1938, when the over-all
extension service was 10,636, the extension room's service
amounted to 5,945 of this total. There was, as one mountain
man said, "a powerful mess o' lamin* and lookin* " going out to
country people in the hills near Berea. In 1954 the extension
library showed a total circulation of 11,445 books, 4,573 of
which were charged directly from the comfortable, well-lighted
extension room with its east basement door.

This survey of the library's extension work would be incom-
plete if no mention were made of the "extra mile ?> extension
service. The extension librarians rendered many another kind
of aid besides taking books, magazines, and pictures to outlying
schools and families. They helped country women to find a
market for their walnut meats and for their Christmas mistletoe
and saw brier greens. They listened to the mother's sorrow,
the father's defeat, and the children's unsatisfied desires.

A mountain woman begged to be taught how to write her
name, so that hereafter she need not feel embarrassed in the
presence of the mailman when he asked her to sign her name.
Miss Pearl Durst, like an understanding librarian, taught her
this simple thing, and the woman was proud and happy. After
some time the mountain woman reported with an unsmiling
face that she was now married. Miss Durst tried to congratu-

168 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

late her, but the woman only shook her head. "You're going to
be happy, I know/' said Miss Durst. The woman sighed: "I
never thought of it before I married him. 1 can't write my name
now."

in

IN THE FAIRCHILD administration Berea teachers occasionally
rode deep into the hills to lecture on educational subjects. For
example, in 1877 Professor Le Vant Dodge was excused from
teaching during the fall term so that he might do educational
work in the mountains. In 1883 he traveled in twenty-five
counties. This kind of work was continued during President
Frost's twenty-eight years of administration; but he had the
dream of a larger service in his mind. In 1897 he proposed
that "this university extension lecturing should be recognized
as a regular department of our work/' 6 In the fall of 1896 he
sent into the hills a young Oberlin graduate, C. Rexford Ray-
mond, whom he described as "a remarkably fine speaker, a
master of the mountain dialect, a genial, faithful, winning
young man"; 7 but at the end of the first month of extension
work Raymond was taken sick with typhoid fever and had to
give up the promising plans which he and President Frost had
made.

In 1899 when Raymond had recovered his health and had
completed a theological course at Oberlin, lie returned to Berea
as the director of extension work. The college catalog of 1900
contained several paragraphs about his new work: "The Col-
lege readies out to the surrounding region with benefits of
libraries, institutes, lectures, and Sunday schools, as an organ-
ized extension for humanity's sake." It explained that Berea
College desired "to bring as many as possible of the advantages
of learning and the gifts of science to all the people of this
region/'

In addition to outlying work in rural churches, Sunday
schools, and county institutes, the Extension Department of-

A Century of Sharing 169

fered two new sen-ices. One o these, called extension tours,
was a slate of five professors, any one of whom would go into
the mountains to lecture on certain listed subjects. One of the
five was Professor Mason, whose proffered subjects were full-
flavored of the good earth: 1. Why our forests should be pre-
served. 2. Raising more and better stock. 3. How to preserve
the fertility of the land. This, you recall, was before the days
of county agents.

The other new service was called a "people's institute/' in
contrast to the familiar teachers' institute. In the late summer
and early fall of 1900 Director of Extension Raymond and his
young wife, in company with the Normal dean and his wife,
carried on such a people's institute, and Professor Raymond
left an account of this experience. The party, including the
two Raymonds, the two Dinsmores, a cook, and drivers of the
two baggage wagons, traveled more than three hundred miles
in rugged mountain country, sometimes fifty miles from a rail-
road, carrying with them tents, sleeping accommodations, an
acetylene gas stereopticon, a baby organ, and cooking equip-
ment. They held their five-day institutes in ten counties. Their
schedule of meetings began Thursday and closed on Monday or
Tuesday, after which the party would drive for two or three
days by way of creek beds to the next place on their institute
route. Professor Raymond at the end of the trip wrote: "With
our tents and baggage wagons our approach doubtless produced
quite a circus effect, for one man frankly put his head into our
living tent and asked: 'Have you all got any livin' beastes in
the tent?' "

Though the extension party twice traversed the belt where
there had recently been feud warfare, the meetings were undis-
turbed. In each place they found earnest people in the valleys
"eager to know us and get our message. . . . And when, as
often, our newmade friends besought us to come again and
said, "We all never have been fed like this before,' we felt
rebuked at the knowledge that what seemed so little in our
sight was so much in their lives." 8

170 Berea s First Century, 1855-1955

Within eight months after the return of this extension group,
two significant comments were passed upon the experiment of
a people's institute. In December 1900, President Frost re-
ceived a warning from Berea's chief donor that he should not
waste money on extension work, which he characterized as
^humbug/' 9 Fortunately President Frost was not the man to be
frightened by a mere six-letter word.

In the following June, Professor Raymond, in commenting
upon his experience in the preceding autumn, wrote: "It will
make a great difference fifty years hence in all this great ter-
ritory, and through its influence, in the whole nation, whether
our extension workers penetrate one hundred or two hundred
miles further into the mountains, and whether eight hundred
or sixteen hundred students are in attendance at Berea." 10

In 1902 President Frost wrote an illuminating message on
the subject of planting ideas of progress in the mountains: "To
the dwellers on the headwaters of the Kentucky Elver it is a far
cry to Berea, and all the voices of civilization sound faint and
indistinct. We propose to go out and make friends with these
isolated people, and bring them a few seed-thoughts. In this
work we have had no forerunners or examples, and we are
feeling our way. . . . The starting of these people toward greater
light is so urgent a matter that we cannot wait for them to come
to Berea. Indirectly our extension work will bring many stu-
dents, but the immediate object is to benefit those who may
never come." 11

In the history of the people's institutes there were four very
successful leaders, C. Rexford Raymond, John W. Dinsmore,
James P. Faulkner, and Charles S. Knight; but none of these
men served in the field for more than a few years.

The Reverend James P. Faulkner was the director of ex-
tension work from 1908 to 1911. He came to Berea fresh from
study at Harvard University; but he was a mountain man who
had returned to the land of his birth to work on its problems.
With his tent and stereopticon he often forded rocky streams,
and in remote valleys he frequently addressed an audience

A Century of Sharing 171

which had come entirely on foot or on horseback. He talked
about mountain agriculture, better homes, temperance, im-
proved rural schools, and most of all, sanitation and health.
He gave help to young teachers in little slab and log schools.
Miss Katlierine Pettit wrote from Hindman that his message
was the best thing that as yet had come to the mountains. "I
hope Berea will keep him in the mountains all the time." 12

The Reverend Charles Spurgeon Knight began his three-
year service as superintendent of extension work early in 1912.
His outfit consisted of one wagon, two mules, one tent, one
folding cookstove, a stereopticon, and a "talking machine/' as
well as three helpers. His series of meetings in one place lasted
three days, and he lectured on sanitation, better schools, bet-
ter roads, consumption, cure of hookworm, and bad habits, but
always ended his series of meetings with a rousing evangelical
sermon and a call for Christian commitment. He reported in
1913 that he had traveled nearly one thousand miles and had
spoken to more than eleven thousand people.

When Knight retired as a field leader with wagon and tent,
no one was ready to take his place, and the college secretary,
Marshall E. Vaughn, who was also the director of extension
work, handled speakers' service from his office. The full-page
catalog statement of the Extension Department remained un-
changed until 1921, but in reality new ideas of extension work
were quietly maturing. For example, the introduction to the
Extension Department's statement of offerings in the catalog
of 1921 contained a new idea: "Berea proposes to co-operate
with and supplement the work of individuals and organizations
that are doing constructive work in the Southern mountains/'
That statement expresses what has been the very core of Berea's
extension policy since the beginning of President W. J. Hut-
chins' administration (1920). The days of isolated pioneering
in progress had passed. Great organizations like the United
States Department of Agriculture, the United States Office
of Education, the University of Kentucky, the Red Cross, and
the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers had their minds

172 Berea's First Century 7 , 1855-1955

on mountain problems, and Berea College was ready to co-
operate with them, giving and receiving ideas and service.

In the catalog of 1921 the services formerly offered by
Berea's extension service were condensed into very brief state-
ments., and a new sendee was added: that Berea College would
furnish "demonstrators to co-operate with state and local
organizations in putting on school fairs, stock shows, and edu-
cational rallies." Another difference is to be noted in the 1921
statement of Berea's extension offerings, namely, the assump-
tion that local communities would take the initiative in arrang-
ing for any of these extension services. The team-and-tent
days had passed. The days of 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of
America, and county agents were at hand, the days of county
consolidated schools, the days of telephone and radio in the
country home, and the days of cream cans at the gate; and
the extension work was affected by all these movements.

IV

WHEN BEREA COLLEGE in 1899 organized its Extension De-
partment to send speakers into the mountain counties, it set up
another "sower of progress/* a weekly newspaper called the
Citizen, to spread good ideas about agriculture, forestry, home-
making, and the children's schools. The Berea College Re-
porter had been a campus publication, but the new Citizen
was an independent fireside paper that in its early years bore
on its masthead the words: "Devoted to the interests of Home,
School and Farm." It was not a political sheet, but was "de-
signed to teach when and where there was no voice." The
people's institute with its speakers, its stereopticon, and its
organ could be with a community for only a few days in the
summer or fall; the Citizen could come to help them every
week in the year.

The Citizen in several of its early issues published "Our
Platform," saying in substance that its aim was to bring the

Photos by Roy N. Walters, Berei

BEREA'S EXTENSION WORK

Top: Cherry Grove School, Pulaski County project, 1944; bottom: Bonnell
Smith and his mule Ted haul traveling library books from the highway
two miles up the creek to Upper Trace Branch School, Leslie County, 1952

"" 1 7** V "^ ^?.^^H?

**^ ?,%&%$$*'*

( j *t 3#,*g/ N OR 7 "

SOUTHERN APPALACHIA
About 90 per cent of Berea students come from these 230 mountain counties

A Century of Sharing 173

best reading to every fireside, giving weekly a few new ideas
to lighten the labor of housewives and some valuable hints
which would enable the fanner to make more from Ms land
and cattle. Some subjects treated in the Citizen before the
time of the earliest county agents were: Value of fruits as
breakfast food; Keeping food clean; Measurements In cooking;
The teacher and the first day; Education that educates; Some
experiments for boys and girls; Cultivation of memory; Value
of absorbents in stalls; How to get good seed com; Need of a
National Forest Reserve in our mountains.

The first page would contain a column of national and
state news, some Berea personals, a report of outstanding cam-
pus events, and the dates of county courts, county fairs, and
teachers' institutes, as well as a few town advertisements. The
two inside pages in the first two decades usually consisted of
syndicate plate material such as a study of the Sunday school
lesson, temperance notes, and the next installment of a serial
story.

The fourth page was sure to contain at least three full
columns of new r s items from mountain counties. The flavor of
country life was expressed with uninhibited frankness by the
Citizens country correspondents. The following communica-
tions are selected from the county news items contributed dur-
ing the first thirteen months after the Citizen had been estab-
lished in 1899:

"Disputanta, Rockcastle Co.: Miss Johnson of Tanyard
School was tried for whipping one of Win. Gadd's children and
was acquitted. Good for our citizens. The teacher must be
protected."

"Miller's Creek, Estill Co.: Uncle James Smith, was bitten
by a mad dog on the 17th inst He went to the madstone at
Foxtown In Madison County, and the stone adhered only once.
He returned in the full hope that all danger is over."

"Pineville, Bell Co.: G. Taylor was in town recently and the
deputy sheriff levied on his mule. There was quite a tussle
before he got the mule."

174 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

A correspondent from Hyden, Leslie County, wrote: "Some
politicians criticize the L. & X. Railroad. They don't live in
this part o the county. We believe in the L. & N. If they will
build a branch out this way, we solemnly promise that we
won't sue the company even if the train should run over our
jersey calf. We won't steal rides in boxcars. We'll be good.
In default of railroads why not have good district roads? The
fanners will make better fences and clean up their farms, when
good roads run through the county."

From 1907 to 1924 the Citizen bore at its masthead the
words: "Devoted to the interests of the Mountain People/' and
it was altogether suitable that men who were active in moun-
tain field work should also contribute to the Citizens pages.
Dinsmore wrote many articles on school improvement for the
Citizen. Between 1910 and 1913 Faulkner was editor of the
Citizen in addition to his strenuous speaking tours with wagon
and tent. In his three years as editor, the voice of the Citizen
made very challenging demands for improvement in Ken-
tucky > for better parents, better officials, better schools, and
better farmers. This highly educated mountain man had much
to say to mountain people, and he spoke with fearless words
that commanded attention. Each week for three years he
cleared a two-column lane down the middle of his six-column
front page for Ms forceful words. He printed his titles in large
type. A random selection from his headings in the five months
between July 21 and December 22, 1910, gives the reader some
idea of his strong moral and social appeal: "Real coward, the
moral one." "Your job. Mamma, not the Lord's.* 3 ' "Ifs up to the
parents." "15 minutes of friendship and the result/' "Eyes too
sore to see eye sores." "Death's toll in the mountains from
criminal indifference." "Folly of ignorance among farmers."
"An eight-headed dragon." "Make room in the inn" (Decem-
ber 22).

The state of Kentucky needed Faulkner to carry on ex-
tension work against tuberculosis, and the state's gain was
Berea's great loss. Soon after Faulkner left Berea, federal and

A Century of Staring 175

state concern over better roads and schools in the Mil country,

and the increasing importance of the county agent and the
home demonstration agent made it obvious that the Citizen's
best service could be rendered by close co-operation with these
new "sowers of progress." Therefore the pages of the Citizen
became the organ of the local county agent and home agent.
By this time most mountain counties had their own county
papers and hardly needed the Citizen. On the other hand, both
College and town had made very rapid growth in the twenty
years after the Citizen was established, thus creating more
demand for the Berea paper's attention. Since 1925 the Citizen
has been largely a local paper, serving the interests of the town,
the College, and the closely adjoining rural area.

THE UNITED STATES Department of Agriculture in 1912 made
public a plan to demonstrate to the farmer on his own farm the
value of knowledge in practical farming. Immediately Presi-
dent Frost secured this service for Berea, and signed a contract
to co-operate with the U.S.D.A. in their plans. Frank Mont-
gomery, a trained agriculturalist, was employed to teach a
winter term in animal husbandry in Berea College and to
spend eight months of the year in demonstrations to farmers
in parts of five counties adjacent to Berea. This was the first
such federal appointment made in the state and the fifth in the
United States as a whole. 13 This "Special Investigator for Berea
College and the U.S.D.A.** was what is now a county agent.

In Montgomery's first annual report of his work as a farm
demonstrator he wrote that in his first four and a half months
in the field (August to the end of the year 1912) he had visited
282 farmers to study the needs of their locality and select the
men best fitted to cany on demonstration work the following
spring. He reported also the selection of a piece of land near
Berea for experimental work, on four acres of which a soil

176 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

fertility experiment would soon be tried in co-operation with
the Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station. "It is believed
that the publicity given this strictly scientific work by State
publications and our own literature . . . will give a dignity and
prestige to our agricultural course." 14

In 1914 Montgomery reported that in the past year he had
worked with 110 adult farmers and 49 boys and girls, had held
73 public meetings, and had traveled 1,052 miles by rail and
8,129 miles by horse. With genuine insight he wrote to Berea's
president: "The true missionary spirit is required for this work.
It means much for a mountain man to break away from tradi-
tions and take up new methods. Progress must begin with the
young, so much of my time was spent in boys' and girls' club
work." 15 After two years in Berea's work Montgomery too, like
Professor Mason, went into government work.

In 1914 Montgomery was succeeded in his agricultural
extension work by a young Berea College man, Robert F.
Spence, from a farm in neighboring Laurel County, Kentucky.
To an unusual degree Spence's life was rooted in Berea's tradi-
tion. His maternal grandfather had been a defender of John
G. Fee and Cassius M. Clay in the abolition struggle before the
Civil War. Robert Spence himself had begun his student life
in Berea while there were still Negroes in every class. He had
shared in Berea's work program by labor in the horse barn and
in Professor Mason's office. He had taught school in the hills,
and had also taught in Berea while still a student before com-
pleting his normal and agricultural course in 1914. His pro-
found understanding of the mountain farmer was shown by his
common saying, "I believe in working with the farmer, not for
him." His love for boys and girls was shown in the fact that
his first project was with their clubs in his district, which was
southern Madison and the adjoining Rockcastle counties, both
of them seeming by nature unpromising for farming.

Forty years he worked with the people of this district,
retiring in 1954. His task was to make a better living possible
through better farming, and this work never grew stale to him.

A Century of Sharing 177

He was in the employ of Berea College, the University of Ken-
tucky College of Agriculture and Home Economics, and the
U.S.D.A. in co-operative extension work. Berea College not
only paid a share of his salary, furnished him with an office
and part time of a secretary free of charge, the free use of col-
lege rooms for his various projects, and the columns of the
Citizen, but also showed a warm interest in his work because
he was serving the common good in a much-needed field of the
mountain area. This county agent was not looked upon as an
ordinary federal-state employee. He was Berea College sharing
with its neighbors, and it was not by accident that President
W. J. Hutchins in each of his annual reports from 1922 to the
end of his administration in 1939 wrote appreciative words that
showed his interest in County Agent Spence's work, just as
though it were in a department of Berea College. After a home
demonstration agent began work with women's Homemaker
Clubs in 1928, Berea College treated her with a like interest
and practical co-operation. 16

Robert Spence always centered his club work for boys and
girls around the schoolhouse, for he knew that when the
organizer had left, the teacher was still there to press home the
new ideas. He talked to them on a great variety of exciting,
grown-up subjects, as one girl wrote in her report, "seed com,
fertilizer, Liberty bonds (1919), and club work." A boy who
had recently won a first place for Ms club project wrote thus
about Spence: "Our County Agent is a sticker and helps us do
things we think we cannot do." 1T In 1918 one of Spence's club
boys wrote a statement that makes further words about this live
leader superfluous: "When a county agent influences a boy to
burst clods with an ax and manure land by carrying manure in
an old dishpan to put on his corn, and roll rocks off the hill,
he is worthy of being called a county agent. This is what the
county agent is doing that is behind me, and you see we are
beginning to go somewhere." 18

This pioneering county agent was impatient to arouse the
adult farmers in his sleepy district as well as the boys and girls.

178 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

It was not enough, for him to chat in a friendly way with a
fanner about better calves, more fertilizer, and poultry that
would pay more. He must blow a loud horn in their ears, and
blow it over and over. That horn was a slogan, "Paint the
county red." Soon people called him "Red Bob" and not be-
cause of his sandy hair. He wanted to sell the county on pure-
bred cows but red cows, Shorthorns. They ought to be raising
better hogs, pedigreed red Durocs. Did the barn need paint-
ing? Paint it red. And the gates? Paint them red. More silos?
Paint them red too. This county agent was not a bookish pro-
fessor nor an office sitter. He was a picturesque fieldman who
made the people listen to him. Soon he had the women raising
Rhode Island Red hens. When they were troubled over a way
to get settings of eggs for purebred Rhode Island Reds, lie
secured the co-operation of first one bank and then of both
banks in Berea., which agreed to invest in settings of such eggs,
selling at the bank for cash or for a promissory note (printed
in red) payable without interest in six months in cash or in
poultry. 19

When this farm agent began his work in 1914, only one car-
load of limestone was used in his territory. Five years later
fifty-four carloads of it were used. He was interested in every-
thing that concerned his farm families, the roads, hog cholera,
better marketing, water piped into the house, hybrid corn and
lambs, improved pasture, sweet clover, rural electric power
and telephones everything. He often held a week's night
school (we might call it a workshop). Instead of introducing
an expert to lecture in the schoolroom, he used his expert to
draw out the farmers' problems in a round-table discussion.
Always back of him was Berea College with its resources at
hand for his agricultural fairs, demonstrations, and conventions,
for he was a means by which Berea shared with the mountain
people.

"Red Bob" Spence's successor is a graduate of Berea's
four-year College course in agriculture, and through him too
Berea shares for the common good.

A Century of Staring 179

VI

A COUNTY ACHIEVEMENT Contest was initiated in 1922 by
Berea College through Secretary M. E. Vaughn, with, the aid
of Professor Everett Dix, a special supervisor of social sendee
under the Red Cross, and sponsored by Berea's trustee Judge
Robert W. Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier Jour-
nal, who offered two prizes, one of 83,000 and the other of
82,000, to the counties of eastern Kentucky showing the great-
est progress in the seventeen months (later changed to two
years) of the contest. 20 A manual was prepared by Vaughn in
collaboration with the Red Cross and the Kentucky Depart-
ment of Education, Agricultural Experiment Station, and Board
of Health. This booklet listed the ten branches of the contest
and the natural leaders in each of these departments, county
agents and home demonstration agents, health officers, county
superintendents and boards of education, county judges and
fiscal courts, local editors, Red Cross and club leaders, as well
as committees of religious leaders. A maximum of 10,000 points
was assigned to the ten projects: 2,000 points for improve-
ments in the school system; 1,000 each for health and sanita-
tion, home and farm improvement, church and Sunday school,
agriculture and livestock, community clubs, junior clubs, roads
and public buildings; and 500 each to community clubs and
to newspaper circulation. This free manual which Berea Col-
lege distributed to the project leaders contained the rules and
the score sheets. 21

Ten counties entered the contest, which "quickened seven
of the competing counties to undreamed of co-operative effort."
This contest harnessed the social forces of the county to the
common good. If a farmer put screens on his windows or built
a sanitary privy for his family, if a congregation painted its
church, if a county employed a county agent, issued bonds for
a new county courthouse, or employed a county nurse, points
were scored for the county.

180 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

In seven counties more than 20 ? 000 man-days of free labor
were given to road building, and more than 2,000 team-days.
In one county five Sunday schools with 409 pupils were in-
creased to twenty-three Sunday schools with 1,950 pupils
enrolled. Lee County won first place, and Jackson and Rock-
castle tied for second place; but it was clear that whether or
not a county shared in the prize money, it had won in reality
because so much progress had been made and so much co-
operation had grown up among the people of each county. 22

VII

COUNTY AGENT SPENCE in his annual report at the close of
the calendar year of 1930 noted in a few simple words that a
butter and cheese factory had been established on a small scale
by Berea College and that farmers that year had received
S13 ? 000 for milk sold to the College. In the annual reports for
the succeeding years of his work as county agent he never
failed to express his appreciation of the college creamery's
service to his farmers in buying their cream and whole milk to
make into butter and cheese for the market.

From its beginning the creamery has been unique among
Berea's industries because it has served as a laboratory for
training agricultural majors in the practical and technical
business of dairy manufacture rather than as an absorber of
student labor in general and because it has supplied a better
market for fanners' milk and cream than had existed previously
in Berea's larger community. From the latter service it has
touched in an economic way an astonishingly large number of
farm families in five adjoining counties.

The first year of its operation was a drought year in eastern
Kentucky with cash very scarce. In June, 1931, President
Hutchins wrote in his annual report: "The Creamery has bought
from neighboring fanners in this year of their great distress
more than $19,000 worth of milk/' By the sixth year of its

A Century of Sharing 181

operation (1935-1936) It was buying cream and whole milk
from 562 farm families. 23 The number of farmers who sold to
the creamer} 7 was really more important, especially in drought
years, than the total amount paid out to them, because it was
the small farmer who most needed such marketing aid and a
cash income. In the year 1953-1954 some 850 farm families
sold milk and cream to the college creamer}". 24

Under the wise direction of Howard B. Monier, superin-
tendent of the dairy and the creamery, the latter has been a
means of adult education as well as a cash resource. Until
recently Monier provided his farmers with mimeographed
material to show them the importance of raising the best stock
and to give hints on feeding. As President Hutcbins expressed
it: "He sends out with the college checks little sermons on
sanitation and milk production." 25 In recent years Monier has
sent every two weeks an excellent printed dairy newspaper
with the milk check. He used to call upon his farm patrons
so as to talk over their dairy problems, but now uses half the
time of an assistant to visit his farmers.

VIII

IN THE YEABS between 1925 and 1950 Berea adventured in an
"Opportunity School/' a unique form of adult education in-
tended to appease "the other kind of hunger" among young
adults who were dissatisfied with the dullness of their lives, for
plain young people who were not illiterate nonthinkers, but
who vaguely craved stimulation and guidance to new interests,
though they could at that time attend school for only a few
weeks.

Miss Helen H. Dingman had learned from Mrs. J. C. Camp-
bell the advantages of the Danish folk school as a pattern for
adult education, and secured not only the consent, but also the
enthusiastic co-operation of President W. J. Hutchins. The
first such school in Berea College was held for three weeks in

182 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

January, 1925, with twenty-three students in attendance, thir-
teen men and ten women, coming from fourteen counties in
Kentucky., one in Virginia, and one in Tennessee. It was not
easy to adapt the traditionally informal procedure of the Danish
folk school to a college campus where classes were fitted into
a fixed daily pattern; but it was possible, and so it was done.

This school continued to meet each January with the ex-
ception of 1929, when influenza was rampant. Although these
students were usually assigned to vacant dormitory rooms, they
always ate together in one of the college dining rooms, and
they always had a Tbome," a room of some size, preferably with
a fireplace, and equipped with easy chairs as well as straight
classroom chairs, plenty of tables large and small, and books in
abundance within arm's reach. This room was open for their
exclusive use at any hour of day or evening, and it played an
important part in speedily welding two or three dozen young
strangers into a group. "We at once realized . . . that we were
in a place where we need not be afraid to express ourselves/'
wrote a student regarding the first morning's session of the
Opportunity School in 1941.

The Opportunity School in Berea followed closely the prin-
ciples of the Danish folk school. There was no scholastic re-
quirement for entrance, and there were no tests of knowledge
anywhere in the course, the only requirement being that a
student must be over eighteen years of age. All teaching was
by use of the 'living word," and so the students had no assign-
ments in textbooks, though every encouragement was given
them to read books in the home room or in the library. Some
students took notes studiously, while others listened without
writing a word. One farmer of sixty, a most eager student,
constantly took notes in slow, cramped writing. Miss Dingman
had helped him to complete a thought after class, and then had
asked what he was going to do with his notes. "Well," he said,
"I have promised to tell my old Pap all that I have learned
here. When I get back home, we'll sit by the fire and talk it all
over." His "old Pap" was over eighty.

A Century of Sharing 183

The men and women who attended Opportunity School
were likely to be farmers, carpenters, miners, lumberjacks,
rural teachers, rural ministers, housewives, weavers, and youths
who had not yet found their way of living. The morning talks
were from such fields as literature, home science, child care,
biology, music, Bible, history, and social problems. The after-
noon's work might be in the loom house, the woodwork shop,
the printing office, the sewing department, the plumbing de-
partment, or some agricultural adjunct such as the dairy bams,
the farm, or the poultry houses. After a visit to the dairy barns,
one of these men remarked, "Berea is the dumdest place you
ever saw in your life. They won't even let you spit in the barn!"

At the Chapel assembly there was at least one treat for
them each year, such as the music of the Stradivarius Quartet.
One year there was a demonstration of the color organ, and at
another time a demonstration of liquid air. President Hutchins
usually invited them to spend an evening at his home, and the
comments afterward show their sincere appreciation, even the
outspoken words of one of these guests: "We sat in President
Hutchins' chair at his desk, talked on his dictaphone, and
played skittles in his sun parlor." Music from first to last was
one of the most vital parts of each Opportunity School group.
They delighted to sing "Whenever God doth let us see His
treasures," to the music of Sibelius. In the evening recreation
hours there was always music, sad, gay, moody, and reminis-
cent. One student wrote in 1940: "Not the least of our music
hours were our own songs around the fire, whether old songs,
hymns on Sunday night, or Jim lining out 'Old Mossy Moun-
tain.' " 26 It was 1945, the twentieth year of this institution of
Opportunity School. The school had come to a close, and the
young men and women were going home, the songs of their
Berea fireside echoing in their hearts. One of these students
wrote back for the annual prepared by the Opportunity School
students, the "Echo": "The train that carried these last 1945
members from Berea whistles back the refrain, "Live and learn

i ~\ y >?o'r

-j-u-b-i-l-e-e. 2T

184 Berea* s First Century, 18554955

An institution of self-expression that gave added value to
this three-week experience in Berea was the annual Oppor-
tunity School banquet, served in a small dining room of the
boarding hall. The tables, arranged in a rectangle, were deco-
rated with flowers, lighted candles, and interesting place cards
made by the students. The menu was that of a holiday. At one
end of the room exhibits of the students' handiwork were on
display weavings, woodwork, printing, millinery^ handbags,
designs for family conveniences, and sometimes even designs
for plumbing. One of the students acted as toastmaster, in-
variably with dignity, humor, and originality. In 1926 Presi-
dent Hutchins wrote in his annual report: "I attended the final
^banquet' of the school, and heard boys and girls, who had
never dared to stand and speak before; I heard a song which
two of the students had written; I saw a light never before
seen on the faces of the men and women; and I am grateful/'
The banquet came to an end. The term was over, "And com-
mon folk like you and me are builders of eternity/' wrote one
of these students on the title page of the last "Echo/' 1950,

The registrar's records show that during the twenty-five
years of this adventure 679 students were enrolled in Oppor-
tunity School, and that at some later time 111 of these enrolled
for regular course work. These figures, however, have nothing
to say about the warmth of friendship pervading the group,
"better to me than the world's gold or silver/' wrote one young
woman; the revival of hope that led more than a hundred of
these students to return for long-term courses; the creativeness
that surged in them as they returned to their homes; the
rhythms that they hummed in later days.

Three years after the first Opportunity School was held on
the campus, an urgent request came for a week-end school in
the mountain community of a man who had gained much in
the three-week school in Berea. Plans were carefully laid, and
the experiment was a success, though the weather was uncom-
monly bad. The attendance averaged about 100, though at the
climax 168 were present.

A Century of Sharing 185

Until war came on, it was the custom for several such
extension schools to drive out to the hills in October or early
November, after the crops were in and before rough weather
came on. Xo group went out unless urgently invited by the
community, which provided hospitality and half the transporta-
tion cost. The term of the school was a week end, the place a
schooihouse, a settlement house, or occasionally a church. It
became the custom to include in the extension group an ex-
perienced and versatile song leader, a minister who would lead
the morning devotions and preach on Sunday but could also
present some secular interest, a storyteller who could hold in
his grasp both children and adults of all ages, a speaker on
social problems, history, or government, and a speaker on some
phase of agriculture, homemaking, or a natural science. A
mountain man who wanted to express his appreciation of the
extension school summed up his thoughts in 1944 when he said
in his words of farewell: "YouVe left us many a thought and
dropped us many a hint." "Child, this is better than a revival,"
said another man to Miss Dingman.

The evening meeting had begun about six o'clock, as was
the country custom. After a song and a story the speaker had
talked almost an hour to an audience that drank in every
word. It had been planned to close the day with a marshmallow
roast around a bonfire. A man in the audience walked de-
liberately forward and said to Miss Dingman, "Do you reckon
that man would give us another talk? We could just sit down
and begin all over again/'

The extension Opportunity Schools which had become pos-
sible because of the automobile and somewhat improved roads
necessarily became fewer in wartime because of gas rationing
and tire shortage; and after the war they were slow to recover.
No Berea teacher who participated in even one of these ex-
tension experiences would ever forget the challenge made to
him by the sight of his soul-searching audience, or the ques-
tions put to him at the fireside of his host.

186 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

JX

Ix 1948 AT THE invitation of Kentucky's State Department o
Education, Berea College became a partner along with six state
and municipal colleges In a rural school Improvement project.
Each college was to work with some Kentucky county on
developing and putting into practice some plans for improve-
ment. The Pulaski County Board of Education in the mountain
field invited Berea College to adopt that county for Its study.
At once the Berea-Pulaski Co-operative Enterprise was formed.

At that time there were In Pulaski County 111 one-teacher
schools., now reduced to 93. The teachers were greatly under-
paid; the shabby little school buildings were in a bad state of
repair, many of them without a teacher's desk or even a man-
made toilet. The teachers were deeply discouraged, and the
people in general indifferent to the rural child's welfare.

Berea furnished three-fourths of the time of a professor, Dr.
Charles C. Graham, to serve as co-ordinator of the project. "He
Is our spark plug," one of the county officials remarked. His
greatest service was to interest people in plans for county prog-
ress not only in school but also in social welfare. Besides
teachers and parents, the service clubs of the county, the
county Board of Health, the county agent, the home demon-
stration agent, and the two county newspapers took an active
part making Improvements. "Actually," said Dr. Graham In
1946, *we had and have but one aim, and that is to improve
living throughout the county." Through the county superin-
tendent he secured the appointment of four of the best rural
teachers in the county to act as supervisors, "helping teachers/'
as they were called. Berea College from special funds given
for the purpose financed the traveling expenses of these helping
teachers, as well as providing small subsidies for them and
money for working materials. Berea also furnished about forty
traveling libraries, and each year offered prizes for the rural
schools that made the greatest improvement In various lines.

A Century of Sharing 187

In the first year 103 schools were painted Inside ? outside, or
both. By 1946 count}- teachers' salaries had been increased by
77 per cent. A hot lunch program was set up to provide half
the vitamin and caloric content necessary for growing children.
Some of the clubs arranged to pay for a dental trailer's service
for six weeks. As time went on, the people in the county
carried more and more of the burden, so that Berea's help
finally became unnecessary. 28

In 1949 the Pine Mountain Settlement School became
financially unable to cany on its former work in southeastern
Kentucky, and Berea was urged to continue this superrural
work. After much deliberation an arrangement was made with
the Harlan County School Board to turn the Pine Mountain
high school organization into a consolidated elementary school,
the county to pay the teachers, provide buses for an eight-
grade school, and pay a small rental for the use of the Pine
Mountain classrooms, library, and lunch rooms. On the other
hand, Berea College would share with Pine Mountain in main-
taining the buildings and grounds and in providing medical
and agricultural work for this greatly needed school in the
heart of the mountains. The College received the right to
recommend well-qualified teachers to the county superintend-
ent for the school and to use the school for rural teacher train-
ing, if it wished.

The two hundred pupils in this elementary consolidated
school are residents of what were formerly one-room school
districts in an area twenty-five miles in radius. Their parents
are disadvantaged, for they live by lumbering and mining,
since there is a lack of good bottom land for farming. The dis-
tricts here consolidated are ones that are unusually isolated by
the mountain walls. They need the medical service, the hot
lunches, the discipline of a well-managed playground, the im-
proved schoolroom equipment, the records of good music, and
the science that is skillfully taught from the surrounding hills.
It is interesting to see Berea a partner of Harlan County in
enriching a school in the heart of the Kentucky mountains. 29

188 Berea's First Century, 1855-1955

After eight years of dreaming, Berea in 1953 found a way
to carry on another sharing project. This venture is financed by
the Fund for the Advancement of Education, established by
the Ford Foundation, and is directed by a Berea professor, Dr.
Luther Ambrose. The plan is to train teachers in such a way
as to make them regard rural teaching even in the most remote
mountain valleys as a profession and a challenge to a college
graduate, regardless of low salaries and isolation. Neither the
sponsoring Fund nor Berea College pays the salary of these
teaching fellows; that is the responsibility of the public school
system, as in the Pulaski and the Harlan County projects. The
Fund does, however, finance the selected teachers in addition
to the county's remuneration. Since the philosophy of the pro-
gram is that material improvements should come from local
effort, the teachers strive to stimulate such local effort, and the
helping teachers furnished by the Fund guide the teachers in
this work. In the summer these teaching fellows are given the
privilege of travel in America or in Europe at the Fund's ex-
pense, and the chance to do graduate study in the summer at
the college of their choice, besides having their expenses paid
at conferences of the group.

The valleys are very isolated, the communities are under-
privileged, and the teacher's life is lonely enough. A visitor
from Louisville was taken by means of a jeep to Forked Mouth
School, where a man and his wife taught under the new
project. The man explained to the guest: "I am trying things
I never tried before, instead of just going on teaching the same
old way." 30

The project is financed for three years. The director, the
experts who brave the deep roads to visit these schools, and the
chance visitor fortunate enough to accompany the little party
that goes out from Berea at least once a week when school
holds raise many questions as to the next step that should be
taken in order to make the most of this pioneering experiment.
This much at least is certain, that Berea College still has the
youthful spirit of a young adventurer. The light in Berea's

A Century of Sharing 189

tower still throws a shaft of light along the rough road that
leads to Pine Mountain and Middle Squabble.

Berea College in 1955 as in its early days strives to meet
urgent human needs, especially when they are in the field of
education. The Berea pattern of college life tends to leave in
the graduate a permanent sensitivity to social needs and a
desire to share in the betterment of some precinct of his world.

A SURVEY OF SOURCES

THE HISTORY of Berea College is found largely in the records
accumulated during the past century, and for the purpose of this
book the foremost among these sources are the official papers of
the College, especially the Annual Reports.

Since 1870 it has been customary for members of the faculty,
especially heads of departments, to report annually on their activi-
ties to the president of the College, who in turn transmits to the
trustees his report based upon faculty reports and his own con-
siderations. Since 1893 the president's report has been printed, but
President Frost occasionally read to the faculty and trustees a longer
and franker report than he had published. These faculty and
presidential reports, whether printed or unprinted, are invaluable
for an understanding of Berea's history.

Other official papers complement the Annual Reports. The
Reports of Common School District no. 16 for 1855 and 1856
reflect Berea's beginnings. Since 1858, except during the Civil War
period, 1860-1865, the Board of Trustees has kept Minutes of its
proceedings. The Prudential Committee has kept Minutes since
1858, but unfortunately those for the period 1886-1908 have dis-
appeared. The Faculty Minutes have been kept since 1866, and to
these should be added the miscellaneous records of the registrar,
the financial reports of the treasurer, and the surviving Minutes of
the Ladies' Board of Care, which date from October 25, 1880, to
May 8, 1903.

The development of the governing regulations of the College
may be found in the Berea Constitution and By-Laws, 1859; Founda-
tions, 1900, which includes constitutional changes to 1899; Consti-

192 A Survey of Sources

iution and Statutes . . . as revised and amended, 1911; Constitution
and Statutes . . . 1855-1917, 1917; and Historical Documents: Con-
stitution and By-Laws, . . . 1855-1929, 1929.

The College early felt a need to publicize its work, and this was
done by a series of historical sketches. Origins and Principles of
Berea Literary Institution was published in 1868, and a notation in
pencil adds that the first four pages were written by J. A. R. Rogers
and the remainder by John G. Fee. A booklet of addresses that
were delivered in 1869 before a Berea meeting at Cooper Institute,
New York, contained an introduction of twenty-two pages entitled
"Historical Sketches of Berea College/' by J. A. R. Rogers. President
E. Henry Fairchild was the author of a small book entitled Berea
College, Ky. An Interesting History, which was approved by the
Prudential Committee, published in Cincinnati, 1875, and reprinted
in a revised form in 1883.

College activities may be seen in the Catalog, published yearly
since 1867, and in the Bulletin, which began in 1902. Greater detail
about the college people of past years is included in Historical
Register of the Officers and Students of Berea College from the
Beginning to June, 1904, 1904; Historical Register . . . -from the Be-
ginning to June, 1916, 1916; and Alumni Catalogue, 1870-1929, 1930.
Among other official publications on Berea's work are Berea General
Hospital, 1899; Manual of the County Achievement Contest for
Eastern Kentucky, 1922; The Berea Way. Information on Admis-
sion, 1940 to present; and Glimpses of Berea College, 1953.

ii

BEREA COLLEGE in its first century has abounded in publicists.
Officers and faculty have given addresses, written articles, composed
letters, and made memoranda which, though expressing their own
viewpoints, have nevertheless reflected also the principles and life
of the institution. These papers are generally less sensational and
more sympathetic with Berea's complete educational program than
are the writings of professional journalists. Of the hundreds of
letters used in preparing this book, only the most important col-
lections and the more unusual pieces of individual correspondence
are included.

A Survey of Sources 193

The surviving papers of John G. Fee are particularly abundant
and valuable. Between June 3, 1845, and July 22, 1846, he published
a series of fifteen articles in Cassius M. Clay's True American on the
sinfulness of slavery. Two years later Fee rewrote this material
and published it in an enlarged form as a book, An Antislavery
Manual, which the American Missionary Association republished in
a shorter form, 1851. This Antislavery Manual was the book which
Clay distributed widely in Madison County shortly before Fee
moved to the Berea Ridge. Between 1846 and 1881 one hundred
twenty-six articles and letters written by Fee were published in the
American Missionary. Fee's activities in the Berea region are dis-
cussed in fifty-four letters written by Fee to A.M.A. secretaries,
1855-1869, and now preserved in Fisk University, and in twenty-
one letters written by Fee to Gerrit Smith, 1855-1874, now in the
G. S. Miller Collection in Syracuse University. Fee's "Discourse"
(ms. ) delivered on November 13, 1859, in Plymouth Church, Brook-
lyn, N. Y., is of special interest because it was the immediate cause
of the Berea "exile" in December, 1859. In 1876 he wrote a Fourth
of July address entitled "Historic Sketch of Berea, Ky." Between
January, 1885, and June, 1886, he published in the Berea Evangelist
a series of articles entitled "Berea: Its History and Work." In 1891
he published his Autobiography, the work of his old age, and in
1896 he wrote a further autobiographical article (ms.) "for a bio-
graphical encyclopedia."

Through Clay's written list the names of those who were exiled
from Berea in 1859 and 1860 have become a matter of record.
A fortnight after the exiles left the Ridge late in 1859, Clay in a
political speech from the Capitol steps in Frankfort, January 10,
1860, made considerable reference to the recent exodus and to his
high respect for the service of Fee to education. This speech is
printed in full in Cincinnati Gazette Pamphlet, no. 1, 1860. In Clay's
Writings, New York, 1848, and in his Memoirs, Cincinnati, 1886,
frequent comments are made about his relation to Fee's Berea work.

Four articles by J. A. R. Rogers in the New York Independent
(September 23, October 7, November 4, and December 2, 1858)
reveal the conditions of living in the Kentucky mountains when
Berea College was founded. Twenty-three letters and articles writ-
ten by J. A. R. Rogers between 1858 and 1873 were published in the
American Missionary. Although Rogers left Berea in 1878 because

194 A Survey of Sources

of ill health, he served as a trustee for many years and never lost
his deep concern in the Berea work. In 1903 he published an
interesting little book entitled Birth of Berea College. A Story of
Providence. While writing this book he carried on an active cor-
respondence with President Frost about Berea's history, and sixty-
three of his letters to Frost on this subject remain. In 1904 while
Frost was writing a short history of Berea, J. A. R. Rogers wrote
eighteen more letters to Frost about the early days in Berea. There
also exists an undated manuscript of twenty pages written by
Rogers under the title "The Exodus."

Both Mrs. Fee and Mrs. Rogers wrote interesting stories about
Berea life before the war, and some of these were published in the
American Missionary; but Mrs. Rogers' best historical writing was
a personal history of life in Berea before the war, narrated in sixty-
nine typed pages about 1910.

The trustees who were alumni of Berea College often spoke of
Berea history. One of the speakers at John G. Fee's funeral was
James Bond, a trustee who had graduated in the class of 1892.
His beautiful address is printed in the Berea Quarterly for February,
1901. William E. Barton, of the class of 1885, performed many
helpful services for Berea College when he was a trustee, one of
which was to help in securing donations from Dr. D. K. Pearsons.
While the waterworks which he had been instrumental in securing
were under construction, Barton addressed the student body in a
historical "oration" entitled Dr. Pearsons' Birthday. Another loyal
trustee who performed many services for Berea was J. R. Rogers,
eldest son of J. A. R. Rogers. In 1915 he wrote a short "Life of
J. A. R. Rogers," and in 1931 the Alumnus, I, 6-10, published his
article on "Pioneering in Berea."

Among historical material coming from trustees who were not
Berea alumni should be mentioned a scholarly paper on "A History
of the Day Law, 1904-1910," written by the Reverend A. E.
Thomson, who became the first principal of Lincoln Institute. An
excellent historical address was given by Trustee Seth Low Pier-
repont upon the occasion of the retirement of W. J. Hutchins as
president. This address, "Berea Then and Now," was later pub-
lished among Significant Addresses, Berea, 1939.

A Survey of Sources 195

The addresses and papers of Berea's presidents are of unusual
value as sources because they originate in the presidential office.
The inaugural addresses of Berea's five presidents are available for
use today President Fairchild's in a pamphlet, Inauguration of Rev.
E. H. Fairchild, Cincinnati, 1870; President Stewart's in a separate
pamphlet, The Work and Claims of the Christian College, Cin-
cinnati, 1890; President Frost's in a pamphlet containing several of
his talks, Spent Arrows, Cincinnati, 1893; President W. J. Hutehins'
address on "Berea's Changeless Task in Times of Change," in the
Berea Citizen, October 28, 1920; and the address of F. S. Hutchins
on "Berea's Foundation Stones," published in the Berea Alumnus, X
(1939), 79-82.

Usually the president gives the sermon or address to graduates,
and these baccalaureate addresses are particularly important as
sources, among them being baccalaureate addresses of 1878 and
1881 on Negro and mountain students' peculiar problems (Cin-
cinnati, 1878, 1881); President Frost's address to graduates in 1917,
"God's Dealings through Twenty-five Years" ( Berea Citizen, June 6,
1917); President W. J. Hutchins' addresses in 1924, "I Never Lose
Heart" (Berea Citizen, June 12, 1924), and in 1929, "The Good
Cause" (Berea Citizen, June 6, 1929); and President F. S. Hutchins'
baccalaureate address in 1949 on "Trumpet Calls" (Berea Alumnus,
XIX (1949), 260-67), and his address in 1954 on "Berea's Pattern of
Education in a Confused World" ( Berea Alumnus, XXIV ( 1954 ) , 132-
33 ) . Among other presidential material useful as sources should be
mentioned Frost's "Historical Sketch of the Life of John G. Fee," in
Berea Quarterly, V (February, 1901), Historical Sketch of Berea
College, Berea, 1904, and his autobiographical For the Mountains,
New York, 1937, written shortly before his death; W. J. Hutchins'
article on "Programs of Rural Improvement in Appalachia" (Rural
America, XVII (April, 1939)); and F. S. Hutchins' article on "1939
to 1949" in the Berea Ahimnus, XX (1949), 69-71, 73.

Among the faculty whose service is concerned mainly with ad-
ministration, mention should be made of M. E. Vaughn, who while
secretary of the College and superintendent of extension work wrote
"County Achievement Contest in Kentucky" for Mountain Life and
Work, I (April, 1925). In Mountain Life and Work, July, 1931, Dr.
A. G. Weidler, the dean of labor, had an excellent article on "Berea's

196 A Survey of Sources

Student Labor Program/' and his Labor Day Address on "Labor,
Learning, and Leisure" was later printed as a pamphlet, Berea, 1938.
H. Clyde Jones, superintendent of the bakery since 1931, gave an
address on Labor Day, 1942, on "Evaluation of Student Labor"
(HIS.)- The present dean of labor, Dr. Wilson A. Evans, is the
author of a study, "Increasing the Educational Values of the Berea
Colege Work Program," which was approved in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education, Teachers'
Colege, Columbia University, 1954. The author of a valuable article
in the 1948 Alumnus, "The New Guidance Program at Berea Col-
lege," C. N. Shutt, has been the director of guidance and testing
in the College since 1947. Louis Smith, author of an article in the
spring number of Mountain Life and Work for 1950, "Negro Stu-
dents to Be Enrolled at Berea," is dean of the College Department.
Miss A. Gundlach, author of an article in the 1950 Alumnus on
"What of Tomorrow?" has been registrar of Berea College since 1923.

The long list of teachers whose writings furnish good material
for Berea history includes the two earliest teachers of the Berea
District School, William E. Lincoln and Otis B. Waters, whose
reminiscences are in the college library. "Impressions of Early
Berea" was written in 1926 by Clara (Saxton) Rogers, who in her
youth taught music in Berea College in 1878. A long letter written
by Instructor E. G. Dodge to President Frost in 1925 contains im-
portant material bearing on the social relations of Negro and white
students in the early 1890 ? s. Among Berea's treasures is a typescript
of one hundred eighty-seven pages on "The College Forest Re-
serve" by Professor S. C. Mason, the man who persuaded President
Frost to buy the fragments of land that in time constituted Fay
Forest.

For Berea's relations with the mountain people no material is
more valuable than three manuscripts written by Eleanor (Marsh)
Frost after her return from a 500-mile journey through the moun-
tains in the summer of 1914: "Mountain Trip, 1914," "Religion in the
Mountains, 1914," and "Report, 1914," as well her diaries from 1893
to 1946 and several hundred letters loaned to the College by Mrs.
Frost's daughter, Edith (Frost) Colbert. Mrs. Frost was for many
years a teacher of art history and appreciation, but outside of the
classroom she was long President Frost's best helper in raising money
and in binding mountain parents in loyalty to the College.

A Survey of Sources 197

Berea teachers of this generation have written many articles on
present-day movements in Berea College. For example, Frank H.
Smith, Berea's instructor in recreational leadership, wrote an article
for Mountain Life and Work in 1938 on the subject "A Year of
Recreation." In 1940 Professor Rector R. Hardin presented a paper
to the faculty on "The Historical Traditions of Berea College con-
cerning Labor and Educational Emphasis." In 1952 the Alumnus
contained an article by Professor J. W. Hughes on "Westervelt
Shop." Three articles on recent educational projects should be
mentioned here, all of them written by members of the Depart-
ment of Education in Berea College: "Education Comes to McCreary
County," by L. M. Ambrose, in the 1940 Alumnus, "Rural One-Room
Schools can be Good Schools," also by Professor Ambrose, in the
1954 Alumnus, and in 1953 an article in the Alumnus by the staff
of the Department of Education, Dr. Ambrose, Dr. C. C. Graham,
and Pat W. Wear, on "How We Train Elementary Teachers/'

Among the many alumni contributions to the source materials of
the College only a few can be mentioned here. A biography of
John G. Fee, undated, was written by Angus A. Burleigh, a Negro
graduate in the class of 1875. This booklet, John G. Fee, Founder
of Berea College, Berea, n.d., contains many interesting references
to the details of college life in the early days. Bertha (Fairchild)
Lauder, a granddaughter of President Fairchild, in her later years
wrote "A Child Remembers Berea in the 1870V (ms.). John H.
Jackson, a Negro alumnus of the class of 1874, who later became
president of the Kentucky Normal and Industrial Institute, a state
school for Negroes, wrote a History of Education from the Greeks
to the Present Time (Denver, 1905). This book gains a particular
interest from the fact that the three pages on Berea College were
written in the year following the passage of the Day law. E. F.
White, a distinguished lawyer who graduated in the class of 1881,
delivered an address in 1927 to a Berea alumni meeting in Louisville,
and his words were still full of the flavor of his college days (Pin-
nacle, May 4, 1927). Edwin Rogers Embree, a grandson of John
G. Fee, in his Brown America, New York, 1931, wrote a delightful
section about his grandfather under the heading "A Kentucky Cru-
sader." Two alumni who were very successful alumni secretaries
wrote material which is helpful in understanding Berea's history.

198 A Survey of Sources

Charles T. Morgan wrote The Fruit of This Tree, Berea, 1946, a
book which emphasizes Berea's contribution to the education of a
changing world. Charles C. Carrington in the Alumnus of February,
1955, had an article entitled *. . , the heart of the world to me," in
which he tells the story of a Berea alumnus and his wife who re-
turned to work in the mountains in an unusually rewarding way.

Student material is also an important source for the under-
standing of Berea history. One of the choicest student sources is
the Minutes of the men's Phi Delta Literary Society. The motto of
this society was "We love discussion," and the minutes bear out
this assertion. All its books of minutes are filed in the college
library, a series complete from 1868 to 1942, and they show both
the variety of subjects chosen foi discussion and the democratic
nature of their parliamentary procedure. Doubtless the other
literary societies would bear witness to the same things, but Phi
Delta is the only society whose records are available for any con-
siderable period of time.

In June, 1913, the senior class o the College indulged in the
luxury of a published "Senior Book." While it contained some class
and group pictures, it had a much larger percentage of descriptive
material than do yearbooks of today. It also contained a historical
sketch fourteen pages in length. Each year from 1925 to 1929 the
Pinnacle, the student paper of that day, made its last number a
booklet in honor of the senior class. In 1930 the College seniors
published a yearbook, the Chimes? which was to be a reminder not
only of the friendly faces of their college years, but also of those
experiences which had been dearest to them. Each issue of the
Chimes which has followed that first publication is a source book,
though more can be learned about Eerea from its pictures than from
its paragraphs. Among the best parts are the six pages on the
inauguration of President Francis S. Hutchins in the Chimes of 1940,
and a delightful (unnumbered) page entitled "We Contemplate . . ."
in the 1953 Chimes.

The file of thirteen annual numbers of "The Echo," mimeo-
graphed, written by the Opportunity School students between 1938
and 1950 is a unique set of documents. It is almost incredible that
so much of the zest and wonder of this brief extension school could
be expressed by adults so little trained in use of the written word.

A Survey of Sources 199

Certain works written by friends of Berea should be mentioned
here, for example, two books by secretaries of the A.M.A. A. F.
Beard's Crusade of Brotherhood, a History of the American Mis-
sionary Association, Boston, 1909, and F. L. Brownlee's New Day
Ascending, Boston, 1946. Mention should also be made of a
Founders' Day address by Dr. H. R. Muelder of Knox College,
Illinois, on "The Academic Ancestry of Berea" (ms.), 1938.

In 1910 Dr. D. K. Pearsons wrote an "Address" (ms.) for the
celebration of his own ninetieth birthday. E. F. Williams in his Life
of Dr. D. K. Pearsons, Boston, 1911, has a chapter on "Aid for Berea
College."

Two histories of education in Kentucky should receive mention
here: A. F. Lewis's History of Higher Education in Kentucky, pub-
lished in 1899 under the imprint of the Bureau of Education, Wash-
ington; and F. L. McVey's The Gates Open Slowly. A History of
Education in Kentucky, Lexington, 1949, in which Dr. McVey in his
chapter on "The Color Line in Education" put Berea's struggle over
segregation in its larger setting.

Two articles by Miss Adele Brandeis of the Louisville Courier
Journal staff were so full of understanding that both of them were
reprinted in the Berea Alumnus: "Toward a Better Life," (XX
(1949), 2, 4), which gives a glimpse of Berea's extension work as
seen by Miss Brandeis herself; the other, "Happy Ending," an
article on the recent gift of a manuscript to Berea (XXV (1955),
75,79).

In 1919-1920 Mrs. Annie Fellows Johnston wrote a beautiful
story, "Mountain Mailbag," in which two of the principal char-
acters were students from the mountains who attended Berea Col-
lege at a critical time in their young lives. This unfinished manu-
script of almost two hundred pages and the correspondence that
accompanied its writing were a centennial gift of Mrs. Johnston's
heirs, especially Miss Mary G. Johnston of Pewee Valley, to Berea
College. This manuscript is more than a story. It is an excellent
source because it was written by a sensitive and perceptive woman
who saw much more than a casual visitor could have seen.

Another centennial gift to Berea is a collection of Kentucky
mountain ballads as written down, words and music, by a trained
scholar, Mrs. Katherine Jackson French, who visited in many
mountain homes in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

200 A Survey of Sources

This collection also includes a delightful essay on "A Fortnight of
Balladry" by Mrs. French.

Each reader of this bibliography will ask why the author did
not mention this or that source. The best apology the author can
make is that for every source mentioned, there are at least two
others almost as good in the files.

in

THE FIRST PAPER published in Berea was the Berea Evangelist,
a semimonthly publication which appeared from May, 1884, to De-
cember, 1887. Its leading spirit was John G. Fee, who was assisted
by H. H. Hinman and G. F. Browne. In the first column of the first
number the purpose of the Evangelist was summed up in these
words: "The advocacy of all known good and opposition to all
known wrong." Although it was a private and not a college publica-
tion, it usually contained a column of "Berea Brevities," which in-
cluded both town and college news. It was printed on John G. Fee's
private press. Its most important service to history was the publica-
tion of Fee's "Berea: Its History and Work" in twenty-three issues.
The Evangelist ceased publication because the cost was not met by
a sufficient subscription list.

The Berea College Reporter was a college publication which
ran from Summer, 1885, until June 12, 1899. Its first editorial com-
mittee consisted of two professors and the college treasurer, and the
first article on the first page of the first number was a "History of
Berea College," by John G. Fee. The most important subject of
interest on the campus was evidently the recent commencement
exercises, at which Roswell Smith, George W. Cable, Judge W. M.
Beckner, and General Cassius M. Clay were afternoon speakers.
This number was illustrated by pictures of Ladies' Hall and Howard
Hall.

A second number appeared in 1886, none in the next two years,
and two in 1889. In 1890 the Reporter was issued in four numbers,
and by 1891 it had become a bimonthly with six issues a year. In
November, 1893, it became a monthly publication during the school
year, and with the issue of November 1, 1897, it became a biweekly
paper. By that time, however, it was no longer a faculty publica-

A Survey of Sources 201

tion. Beginning with the issue of February, 1892, it had contained
a "student column/' and with the issue of November, 1895, it ap-
peared entirely under student management. When the Reporter be-
came a monthly publication, its price was raised to fifty cents a year,
and there the price remained until its last issue on June 12, 1899,
when it succumbed to financial difficulties. From first to last whether
under faculty or student management, it was a high grade college
paper which reported college life with dignity and interest.

The Berea Citizen began publication on June 21, 1899, little
more than a week after the Reporter issued its final number. At
first this weekly newspaper was published by the College directly,
but since 1904 it has been published by the Berea Publishing Com-
pany, which is closely connected with the College in spirit, though
an independent corporation. Significant college addresses are likely
to be published in this paper, as well as college, town, and country
news.

The Berea News, published from February 9, 1906, to March 5,
1908, was a noncollege local weekly newspaper which failed to make
a place for itself beside the Citizen.

The Berea Quarterly differed both in purpose and in content
from the papers already mentioned. It was a magazine published
by Berea College quarterly from May, 1895, to October, 1916, for
the purpose of cultivating friends and donors through acquaintance
with the work and the problems of the College. Its real editor was
President Frost himself. Its pages were enlivened by many illustra-
tions, and it seemed perfectly natural that an address delivered by
President Woodrow Wilson should appear on beautifully printed
pages of the dignified Berea Quarterly. This magazine ceased to be
published when President Frost's health no longer permitted him
to prepare the Quarterly as well as to raise money for endowment.

The student voice, apparently silent as a source of current cam-
pus news after the collapse of the Reporter, was occasionally heard
in the Citizen, which during the year 1906-1907 made room for a
"Students* Journal" with editors from various student organizations.
Again in 1918-1919 the Citizen gave up two columns to "School
News from Various Departments." With the growth of the College
Department the student demand for a paper of their own became
more insistent, and in May, 1922, a student paper called The Pin-
nacle was established. It was published semimonthly, usually con-

202 A Survey of Sources

sisted of four pages, and contained a few local advertisements incon-
spicuously placed. It had on its board a faculty advisor, who was
likely to be a member of the College English Department. Its
articles were thoughtful and well written, its humor was on a high
level, and its criticisms were mild and fair. In 1929 the Pinnacle,
like the Reporter,, ran against financial rocks. A year later the editor
of the Citizen arranged that it be published on two pages of the
Citizen but under the masthead of The Pinnacle and with its own
student editors. After this arrangement had run for six years, the
Pinnacle in combination with the "Academy Lion/' a mimeographed
sheet, was published as a separate publication. Again in 1938 the
Pinnacle had to suspend publication because of its debt.

The growing College Department missed the Pinnacle, even
though they had not supported it well enough to keep it out of
debt. In 1940 a handful of eager College students set up The Wall-
paper. This consisted of several typed columns about two feet long,
tacked biweekly on the College bulletin boards. The slight cost for
typewriter ribbons, erasers, and a little paper was met by the stu-
dent government board. The typing was done by students on
their own rickety typewriters. Late in 1943 the Wallpaper appeared
on mimeographed sheets which were distributed in the dormitories.
After six years of such effort the Wallpaper in 1946 appeared as a
printed paper of four pages, the weekly publication of the Berea
College Student Association. The paper has usually been troubled
near the end of the year over its finances, but it has shown in-
domitable will to exist. In September, 1954, it changed its name
to The Berea Pinnacle, with the new line at its masthead, "Custodian
of the Students' Right to Know."

The tone of the Wallpaper was affected by the fact that it went
through its early struggle for existence in wartime, and that it was
struggling for its life at a time when a V-12 unit of several hundred
sailors in preofficers' training was living on the campus. The Wall-
paper from its beginning was a paper of criticism as well as a news-
sheet, and after the war it remained more or less a paper of struggle
in contrast to the earlier Pinnacle and to the Chimes.

The Berea Alumnus, which began publication in April, 1931, is
a monthly magazine (except in the summer months) edited by the
secretary of the Alumni Association. It keeps alumni in touch with
recent developments in the College, and since its contributors

A Survey of Sources 203

include administrative officers and teachers on the campus as well
as alumni who are doing things out in the world, it forms an
excellent source of information on current life in the College as a
whole.

Mountain Life and Work, a quarterly periodical which since
1940 has been the organ of the Council (formerly Conference) of
Southern Mountain Workers, was first published by Berea College.
On the cover of its first number, April, 1925, the following words
were printed, words which still express the purpose of the magazine:
"In the interest of fellowship between the Appalachian mountains
and the rest of the nation." President W. J. Hutchins in his intro-
duction on the first page of this number wrote: "The mountains
need constant re-interpretation to themselves and to the world.
Again, every mountain worker needs, longs for, intellectual com-
radeship with others." For the three years from 1942 to 1945 it was
published in Nashville, Tenn., but since 1945 its publication has
been resumed in Berea under the editorship of the Office of the
Council of Southern Mountain Workers.

The American Missionary., organ of the A.M.A., was not strictly
speaking in any way a college publication; but probably no publica-
tion originating on the campus was as essential to the very existence
of Berea College as was this monthly magazine published in New
York, 1846-1934. Before Fee came to the Berea Ridge, he had been
a contributor to the magazine's pages, and after his coming to Berea
it was largely through the letters and articles of Fee, Rogers, and
Fairchild in the American Missionary that Berea's first generation of
donors in the East and North was secured and held. In the late
1870's the articles by Berea men became fewer in number, and in
the 1880*s Berea's name seldom appeared on its pages.

REFERENCES

1: Early Founders

1 Fee, Autobiography, 14.

2 Clav, Memoirs, 570-71.

3 Fee, Antislavery Manual, p. xi.

4 Fee, Autobiography, 94.

5 Clay, Memoirs, 572-73.

6 Clay, Writings, 176-79, 188-92,
204-205.

7 Am. Mm., VIII (1854), 61.

s W. E. Lincoln to W. G. Frost, Oct.

18, 1909; Clay, Memoirs, 561n.
9 Fee, Autobiography, 102-105.
1 Clay, Memoirs, 235.

11 Fee, Autobiography, 121.

12 Am. Miss., s2 II (1858), 40, 88.

13 Lincoln to Frost, Oct. 18, 1909.
i^ Am. Mm., X (1856), 14.

15 Fee to G. Smith, Jan. 4, 1856.

1 6 Rogers to Frost, Oct. 21, 1901.

17 Am. Miss., s2 I (1857), 21.

is Lincoln to Frost, Oct. 18, 1909.

19 Mrs. J. A. R. Rogers, "Personal His-
tory of Berea College," ch. 4.

20 The same, ch. 6.

21 The same, ch. 10.

22 Rogers to Frost, Sept. 24, 1895;
Am. Miss. 9 s2 III (1859), 277.

23 Mrs. Rogers, "Pers. Hist. o Berea
College," ch. 12.

24 The same.

25 The same.

26 Cincinnati Commercial, Dec. 31,
1859.

27 Mrs. Rogers, "Pers. Hist. o Berea
College," ch. 12.

2S Cincinnati Gazette Pamphlet, no. 1,
pp. 2-4.

29 Berea College, Foundations, 6.

30 T. J. Renfro to Fee, Apr. 20, 1860.
si Am. Mm., s2 VI (1862), 186.

32 The same, 278.

33 Berea Evangelist, II (Jan. 25,
1886).

34 Fee, Autobiography, 168-71; Frost,
"Life Sketch of Mrs. Fee/' 9.

35 Berea Evangelist, II (Jan. 25,
1886).

36 Am. Miss., s2 VI (1862), 278.

37 Am. Miss., s2 VIII (1864), 94.

38 Berea Evangelist, II (Mar. 15,
1886).

39 Prud. Comm., Min., Apr. 24, 1865.

206

References

2: Founders during Reconstruction

1 Berea College, Grounds for
Encouragement, 5.

2 A.M.A., Ann. Report, XXIII (1869),
88.

3 Rogers, Ann. Report, June 18,
1882.

4 Sec. M. E. Strieby (A.M.A.) to
Berea College, Oct. 22, 1896.

5 Am. Miss., s2 XIII (1869), 103.
Advance, XLI (1901), 121.

7 Sec. G. Whipple (A.M.A.) to Fee,
May 11, 1868.

8 Advance, XLI (1901), 121.

9 E. H. Fairchild, Berea College, Ky.,
1875 ed, 52.

10 J. H. Fairchild, Oberlin: The Colony
and the College, 1833-88, 75.

17

20

W. G. Frost, For the Mountains,
66.

Prud. Comm., Min., Mar. 9, 1870.
Am. Miss., s2XVII (1873), 253.
Am. Miss., s2 XVIII (1874), 196.
Bd. Trust, Min., Jan. 26, 1879.
G. W. Cable, A Memory of Roswell
Smith (1892), 59.
Am. Miss., XXXIX (1885), 251.
Prud. Comm., Min., May 25, 1872.
Bd. Trust, Min., June 22, 1883.
Fairchild, Berea College, Ky., 1875
ed., 94-95; 1883 ed., 74-75.
Fac., Min., May 12, 1875.
Berea College Reporter, I (Oct.,
1889).

3: A Century of Interrace Education

1 Fee to G. Smith, Mar. 10, 1859. 14

2 Prud. Comm, Min, Jan. 22, 1866.

3 W. W. Wheeler, Report, Mar. 31,
1866.

4 Mrs. W. W. Wheeler to W. G. i 6
Frost, Mar. 26, 1912. 17

5 A. A. Burleigh, John G. Fee, 9-12.

6 Berea CoUege Const, 1859 (ms.), 18
By-law 1. I

7 Am. Miss., X (1856), 14. 20

8 Am. Miss., s2 III (1859), 114.

9 E. H. Fairchild to Mr. Bingham, 21
Apr. 26, 1878.

10 E. H. Fairchild, Notes on Conf. at 22

Fisk Univ, Dec, 1881. 2 3

n Fairchild, Bacc. Sermon, 1881, pp. 24

6-8. 25

12 Berea College Reporter, I 26

(Summer, 1885). 27

is Phi Delta Lit. Soc, Min, June 9, 28

1882.

E. G. Dodge to W. G. Frost, Apr,

11, 1925.

Ladies' Bd. of Care, Min., July 11,

1878.

Bd. Trust, Min., July 2, 1872.

Alumni Res. to Bd. Trust., June 20,

1889.

Bd. Trust, Min, June 21, 1889.

Dodge to Frost, Apr. 11, 1925.

C. G. Fairchild to W. G. Frost,

1920.

Berea College Reporter, TV (June,

1892).

Frost, Arm. Report, 1893 (ms.), 7.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1894, p. 7.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1895, p. 6.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1902 (ms.), 6b.

Ky. Const, sec. 187.

Frost to N. D. H, Oct. 12, 1901.

Corr. W. G. Frost and W. E. B,

Sept 23, 25, Nov. 14, 1901.

References

207

29 Berea Quart., JX (Oct., 1904),
17-18.

30 W. G. Frost to H. C. D., Oct. 28,
1916.

si K.R.S. 158.020, 2-5; 158.990, 1-3.

32 Berea Quart., VIII (Apr., 1904),
24.

33 Berea Citizen, Mar. 24, 1904.

34 Berea Quart., X (Oct., 1906), 27.

35 Supreme Court o U. S. ? Oct. term,

Nov. 9, 1908.

36 Berea Citizen, June 8, 1905.

37 Bd. Trust., Min., Nov. 7, 1906.

38 A. E. Thomson, "Hist, of the Day

Law Situation, 1904-1910."

39 Berea Citizen, July 1, 1909.

40 Berea Citizen, Mar. 26, 1908.

41 Thomson, "Hist of the Day Law
Situation, 1904-1910."

42 Berea Alumnus, XV (1945), 240.

43 J. W. Hatcher, Presentation of J.
W. Bate; Berea Alumnus, XV
(1945) ,239-40.

44 Berea Citizen, Dec. 8, 1927.

4 5 K.R.S. 158.021; Ed. Record, XXXV
(1954), 169.

4 Bd. Trust., Min., Apr. 14, 1950.
*7 Berea Citizen, Dec. 9, 1954.

4: Tte Mountain Field

1 Clay, Memoirs, 571. 12

2 Independent, X (Oct. 7, 1858).

3 Independent, X (Sept. 23, 1858). l 3

4 Independent, X (Dec. 2, 1858). l 4

5 Rogers, "Hist. Sketch of Berea Col-
lege/' Cooper Inst. Addresses, 1869, i5
pp. 17-18.

<5 Am. Miss., s2 XVII (1873), 59. ^

7 E. H. Fairchild, Berea College, Ky., i7
1875 ed., 85-91. 18

8 Am. Miss., XXXVI (1883), 392.

9 Frost to "Brethren in Berea," July i9
16, 1892. 20

10 Frost, Mem. to W. J. H., Mar. 30,
1921. 21

11 W. E. Barton to W. G. Frost, Oct. 22
4, 1893. 23

Frost, Report, Feb. 3, 1894 (ms.),

5-8.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1894, p. 7.

Frost to Ohio Teachers Assoc.,

Cincinnati, 1895.

Berea College Reporter, VI (July,

1895).

Frost, Ann. Report, 1902 (ms.), 5.

Berea Citizen, Aug. 13, 1914.

Mrs. W. G. Frost, Report, 1914, pp.

12-13.

The same, 40.

Mrs. Frost, "Religion in the

Mountains," 1914.

Mrs. Frost, Diary, July 26, 1914.

Berea Quart., VII (May, 1902), 21.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1902 (ms.), 1.

Prud. Comm., Min., Oct. 4, 1915,

5: Changing Patterns of Education

1 Fee to G. Smith, Jan. 4, 1856.

2 Am. Miss., s2 II (1858), 233.

3 Berea Evangelist, I (Aug. 1, 1885);
Fee, Autobiography, 95.

4 A. A. Burleigh, John G. Fee, 14.

5 W. E. C. Wright, Ann. Report,
1883.

6 E. H. Fairchild, Ann. Report, 1878.

7 Fac. to Bd. Trust., Petition of June
19, 1884.

208

References

1

12

15

Frost to "Brethren at Berea," July

16, 1892.

Bd. Trust., Min., Sept. 7, 1892.

Frost, Spent Arrows, 33-34.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1893 (ms.) 5 8;

Ann. Report, 1893, p. 12.

H. H. P. to H. A. Wilder, Sept 30,

1919.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1894, p. 17.

Dinsmore, Teaching a District

School, 3-4.

Agreement with Signatures, 1916-

1917; C. B. Anderson, Ann. Report,

1918.

Frost, Ann. Report, 1902 (ms.), 16.

Frost, Report, Feb. 3, 1894 (ms.),

10-11.

Berea College, Cat., Aug., 1920, p.

30.

Frost, "Farewell Report on Berea

College, 1892-1920," 30-32.

Frost, "Mem. on Berea's Condi-

tions," 1918, p. 5<x

Fac., Min., Jan. 7, 1921.

22
23

24
25
26

27

2 *
29

34

36

Berea College, Cat., Aug., 1920, p.

30.

W. J. Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1924,

p. 16.

Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1925, p. 21.

Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1924, p. 17.

J. C. Campbell, "Future of the

Church andlndep. Schools" ( 1917),

7.

M. E. Marsh to Bd. Trust., May 31,

1932.

J. H. KirHand to G. A. HubbeU,

Jan. 8, 1906.

Hutchins to Dean Campbell, Apr.

19, 1924.

H. M. Jones, Ann. Report, 1901.

Bd. Trust, Min, Oct. 29, 1910.

F. E. Matheny, Ann. Report, 1921.

Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1924, p. 11.

O. H. Gunlder, Ann. Report, 1940.

Knapp and Greenbaum, The

Younger Am. Scholar y 16.

The same, 103-106.

6: Labor for Education

1 T. D. Weld, Report of Man. Labor
of Lit. Inst., 1833.

2 C. A. Bennett, Hist, of Man. and
Ind. Ed. up to 1870, 183-92.

3 Am. Miss., s2 I (1857), 21.

4 Rogers, "Hist of Berea College,"
Cooper Inst. Addresses, 1869, p. 8.

5 Fairchild, Inaug. Address, 1869, p.
6.

6 Fairchild, Race. Sermon, 1881, p.
14.

7 E. F. White, Mem. on E. H. Fair-
child, 1927; Frost, Hist. Sketch,
1904, p. 29.

s Fairchild, Conf . Notes at Fisk Univ.,
1881.

9 Burleigh, John G. Fee, 14.
1 Berea Evangelist, II ( Mar. 15,
1886).

11 Berea College Reporter, II (Apr.,
1890),

1 2 Frost to "Brethren at Berea," July
16, 1892.

is Bd. Trust, Min., Sept 8, 1892.
i* Frost, Ann. Report, 1893 (ms.), 24.

15 Berea Citizen, Sept. 25, 1930; Berea
Quart., VIII (Apr., 1904), 5-7.

16 Berea Citizen, May 29, 1902; Berea
Quart., TV (Feb., 1900), 7-9.

17 J. L. Hill, Ann. Report, 1909.
is S. L. Clark, Ann. Report, 1905.

19 Berea Quart., XI (Jan., 1908), 15.

References

209

20 E. K. Corwin, Ann. Report, 1907;
Berea Alumnus, XI (1941), 167.

21 J. L. Hill, Ann. Report, 1904.

22 M. E. Marsh, Ann. Report, 1910.

23 Marsh to Frost, July 24, 1915.

24 F. E. Matheny, Ann. Report, 1918.

25 Berea College, Cat., Aug., 1921, p.
48.

26 Frost, Report, Feb. 3, 1894 (ms.),
14.

2? Berea College, Where the Time

Card Goes through College, 1953.
2S Berea College, How Some Students

Earned a College Education, 1912,

p. 15.

23 Eerea Alumnus, V (1935), 101.
so Berea Alumnus, VIII (1938), 240-

43.
si R. I, Theme, 1954.

32 A. G. Weidler, Labor, Learning,
and Leisure, 8.

33 E. W. Lockin, Am, Report, 1938.

7: Financing a Private College

1 Fee, Subscription Book, July 11,
1866.

2 Bd. Trust., Min., July 23, 1866.

3 Prad. Comm., Min., Dec. 6, 1869;
July 13, 1871.

4 Berea College, Cat., 1877, p. 27;
1878, p. 26.

5 Am. Miss., XLV (1891), 438.

6 Petition, "To the Friends of Berea
College," Nov. 14, 1891; Feb. 10,
1892.

7 Prud. Comm., "Statement from
Berea College,*' Dec. 26, 1891.

8 Berea College Reporter, IV (June,
1892).

9 Frost, Address, Sept. 23, 1907.
1 Frost, Address, Apr. 14, 1915.

11 Berea Citizen, June 23, 1938; Berea
College Reporter, VI (July, 1895).

1 2 W. G. Frost to Mrs. W. G. Frost,
Mar. 15, 1897.

13 D. K. Pearsons to Bd. Trust., Sept.
13, 1907.

1 4 Frost, "Mem, on Duties of a College
President," 1896.

15 Frost to Mrs. Frost, Jan. 26, 1911.

16 Berea Quart., XVIII (1915), 27.

17 S. C. Mason, "The College Forest
Reserve,'* 5.

is Miss S. B. Fay to W. G. Frost, Sept.
17, 1903.

19 Miss Fay to Frost, Oct. 9, 1903.

20 Miss Fay to Frost, Aug., 1911.

21 A. Ballard to W. G. Frost and Mrs.
Frost, June 10, 1902.

22 Ballard to Frost, Nov. 30, 1903.

2 3 Balkrd to Frost, Sept. 4, 1903.

24 W. E. Barton, "Mem. on Berea
College Water Works," June 22,
1904.

25 Pearsons to Bd. Trust, June 2,
1904.

26 Berea Citizen, June 15, 1905.

27 Barton to Frost, Nov. 14, 1907.

2s C. M. Hall to Frost, Dec. 26, 1910.

29 Hall to Frost, Oct. 30, 1912.

30 Hall to Frost, Aug. 12, 1914.

31 Frost in Treas. Fin. Report, 1920,
4.

32 Frost, Report, May 18, 1920, p. 6.

33 T. J. Osborne to Frost, Jan. 24,
1920.

34 W. J. Hutchins to H. A. W., Sept.
7, 1920.

35 C. G. Fairchild to Frost, 1920.

36 B. Barton to Mr. H., Nov. 27, 1925.

37 W. J. Hutchins to Bd. Trust., Dec.
17, 1929.

210

References

8: A Century of Sharing

15

20

Fairchild, Berea College, Ky., 1875

ed., 87.

Am. Miss., XXXIV (1880), 147.

E. K. Corwin, Ann. Report, 1933.
A. Kirk, Arm. Report, 1938.
Corwin, Ann. Report, 1929.
Frost, Ann. Report, 1897, p. 12.
The same, 18.

Berea Quart., VI (1901), 6-12.
W. E. B. to Frost, Dec. 24, 1900.
C. R. Raymond, Ann. Report, 1901.
Frost, Ann. Report, 1902 (ms.),
17b.

J. P. Faulkner, Ann. Report, 1910;
Berea Quart., XIV (1910), 14.
H. R., Concurrent Res., no. 206,
sec. 7, May 17, 1954; C. Ferguson
to F. S. HutcMns, May 20, 1954.

F. Montgomery, Ann. Report, 1913.
Berea College, Ann. Reports, 1914,
49-50.

Berea Citizen, Sept. 2, 1954.
R. F. Spence, Ann. Report, 1919.
Berea Citizen, Feb. 7, 1918.
Berea Citizen, Apr. 5, 1917; Feb.
21, Mar. 21, 1918; Feb. 13, 1919.
W. J. Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1922,
p. 16.

21 Berea College, Man. of County
Ach. Contest for E. Ky., 5-31;
Berea Citizen, Aug. 28, 1924.

22 W. J. Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1923,
p. 32; 1924, pp. 33-34; 1925, p. 51;
Berea Citizen, Aug. 28, Sept. 4,
Dec. 27, 1924.

23 H. B. Monier, Ann. Report, 1936.

2 4 Monier, Creamery Files, 1953-1954.
2 ^ W. J. Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1936,

p. 32.

2 ^ Opp. School, "Echo," 1940, p. 5.

2 ? Opp. School, "Echo," 1945, p. 21.

2 Somerset Journal, Sept. 19, Oct. 10,
Nov. 7, 1946; Louisville Courier
Journal, Aug. 4, 1946; Sept. 4,
1949; F. S. Hutchins, Ann. Report,
1949, p. 8.

2 ^ Mem. of talks between F. S. Hut-
chins, Berea College, and R. C.,
Harlan Co., Ky., Apr. 4, 1949.

so F. S. Hutchins, Ann. Report, 1949-
1954, pp. 22-23; L. M. Ambrose,
Ann. Report on Rural School Impr.
Project for Sel. Counties in E. Ky.,
Dec., 1953; Louisville Courier Jour-
nal, Apr. 25, 1954.

INDEX

Academy: 89, 94, 97, 100, 105, 137
Adjustment Fund: 55-56, 147
Admission: in early years, 2, 8, 25, 40-
42; gradual change in, 48-50; re-
fused to Negroes, 51-53, 56; re-
opened to Negroes, 60-61; restricted
for nonmountain students, 79-81
Agriculture, study of: 88, 89, 93, 94,
95, 98, 102, 103, 107, 149, 175-76,
177-78, 180

Alumni: on social rules issue, 46; on
Adjustment Fund, 55-56; honors
to, 58-59; in graduate study, 100,
107-109; aid physical examina-
tions, 106; sensitive to social
needs, 106, 189; publications, 134,
192, 197, 202-203; registers of, 192
Ambrose, Luther M.: 188, 197
American Missionary: 27-28, 193, 194,

203

American Missionary Association: 4, 6,
9, 26-29, 34, 35, 141, 142, 143,
199, 203

Annual reports: 86, 87, 191
Anticaste: meaning in Berea, 40;

school to be, 8, 14, 42
Antislavery Manual (Fee): 4, 193
Antislavery stand: 2-5, 12, 14-15, 22,

30, 64, 66, 68

Appalachian America: 70, 72, 80
Autobiography (Fee): 143, 193
Avery, Charles: early donor, 141
Awards, labor: 127-28

Ballard, Addison: trustee, 151-52
Barton, Bruce: financial letter, 158

Barton, William E.: services to Berea,

34, 69, 152, 194
Barton, Mrs. William E.: 152
Basic courses: 101-102
Bate, John W.: honor to, 59
Battle, Wallace A.: honor to, 58-59
Beckner, Judge William M.: 34
Berea, town of: situation of, 1, 9-10;
named by Fee, 2; a free com-
munity, 4, 9; district school of, 6-7,
191; exile from, 16-18, battle noise
in, 21; exiles return to, 20-23; im-
proved transportation to, 36; raiders
in, 37; on Day law, 51, 52; college
utilities shared by, 152, 160
Berea College:

precollege: district school, 2, 6-8,
82; subscription school, 9-13, 82;
first commencement, 11; exile of
leaders, 15-20; reopened, 23; 1855,
1856 reports, 191

founders: Fee, 2, 6-8; Clay, 1, 5-6.
8, 9; Rogers, 2, 8-9; A.M.A., 26-29;
Fairchild, 38

early college: 2, 13, 38, 42, 82;
ideas of, 7, 8, 82-83; constitution
of (1859), 12-13, 82-83, 191-92;
incorporation of, 13, 24; labor in,
35; first college class of, 42-43, 83,
85; departments of, 83; courses of,
84-85; administration of, 85-86;
faculty of, 86-87; grants for Negro
education, 141

after 1889: see Curricular develop-
ment, Departments; Labor, stu-
dent; Negroes in Berea College;
Student Hfe; Teacher training

212

Index

Berea College Reporter: 37, 113, 144,

172, 200-201

Berea Evangelist: 113, 200
Berea Literary Institute: 25, 84-85,

192

Berea News: 201

Berea Quarterly: 71, 114, 153, 201
Bingham, Robert W.: trustee, sponsor,

179

Blythe, Robert: 60
Boarding hall: 33, 44, 77, 122, 124,

127, 131, 136, 145, 184
Bond, James: alumnus, trustee: 55,

194
Boone Tavern: 124, 125, 127, 130,

137

Britton, Miss Julia: 47
Burdett, Gabriel: early trustee, 46
Burdette, Josiah: 121
Burleigh, Angus A.: 41, 84, 113, 197
Burnam, John: 1859 signer, 6, 10
Burnam, Thompson S.: trustee / 161
Business Administration, B.S. in: 98,

103

Cable, George W.: 34

Cady, Cleveland: architect, trustee,

151

Calfee, John E.: 90
Camp Nelson: 23-24, 41, 46, 64, 69
Candee, George: 10, 12, 17, 20
Carlock, Mrs. Daisy: 72
Carnegie, Andrew: donor, 55, 56, 121,

146, 147, 149

Carnegie HaU meeting (1911): 71,

147, 148

Carnegie Library: 121
Carrington, Charles C.: 198
Chapel: first, 31; second, 33-34, 118-

19; Phelps Stokes, 58, 106, 113,
119-21, 122, 131
Christian: meaning as applied to

CoUege, 76, 83

Citizen, Berea: 172-75, 201, 202
Clay, Cassius M. : interest in free com-
munity, 1-2, 4, 6, 19, 64; ideas in
common with Fee, 2, 4, 5-6, 19,

148, 176; help to Fee, 2, 4, 6, 7,
193; contrast to Fee, 5-6; relations
with College, 6, 8, 34, 64, 140;
as a founder, 8, 9; on exile of

Bereans, 18-19, 20, 193; writings,

18-19, 193

Clover Bottom Cabin: 117
Commencement: 11, 34, 45, 54, 117,

145, 147, 152

Constitution of Berea College:
(1859): on race and residence, 2,

42, 63; basic ideas in, 13, 82-83;

labor in, 13, 110
-(1911): special field, 79
Contemporary ancestors, our: 72
Corwin, Miss Euphemia K.: librarian,

121, 165, 166

"Country homes" on campus: 78
County Achievement Contest: 179-80,

192

Cowley, Dr. Robert H.: 104
Crane, Zenas, Sr.: early donor, 157
Cravath, E. M.: 29, 143
Curricular development: three stages,

83; under Fairchild, 84-85; under

Frost, 87-94; 1920-1955, 98-103;

reorganization of 1938, 100-101;

reorganization of 1947, 101; new

aims in physical education, 104-

106; scholarship honored, 106-107;

interest in graduate study, 107-109

Danforth, William H.: trustee, prizes,
128

Davis, James S.: 9, 12, 16, 19

Day law: 49-53, 56, 57, 60

Degrees: 82, 84, 88, 91, 95-96, 102-
103, 109

Departments: School of Nursing, 61,
93, 96; Collegiate, 83, 84, 86-89,
91, 97, 98-100; Preparatory, 83, 85,
89, 94, 97, 100, 105, 137; Normal,
(course) 85, 89-90, (department)
90-91, 97-98, 100, 105, 123; Voca-
tional, 85, 92-95, 96, 100, 123-24;
Foundation, 91, 94, 95, 97, 100,
101, 103; segregation of, 94-96,
148; four-two reorganization of
(1938), 100-101; Collegiate-Foun-
dation (1947), 101-103; Labor,
123, 124, 130, 131; Health, 130

Dike, Charles F.: early donor, 35, 141,
142

Dingman, Miss Helen H.: 181, 182,
185. See also Opportunity School

Index

213

Dinsmore, John W.: 90, 169, 170, 174
Dodge, Le Vant: 168
Durst, Miss Pearl: extension librarian,
167-68

Efficiency Fund: 148-49, 153

Embree, Edwin K: 197

Enierick, Jacob: early signer, 12

Ernberg, Mrs. Anna: 118

Evans, Wilson A.: dean o labor, 134,
196

Extension work: rural school improve-
ment, 76, 91, 97-98, 186-89;
speakers, 90, 167-71; extension
tours, 169; "people's institutes,"
169-71, 172; co-operative with
various agencies, 171-72, 175-77,
179, 186-88; demonstrators, 172,
175; Berea Citizen as, 172-75;
agricultural, 175-78, 179; home
demonstration, 175, 177, 179, 186;
creamery's service as, 180-81; Op-
portunity School as, 181-185; li-
brary, see Library: extension work

Faculty: 47, 52, 72, 85-87, 93, 95, 101,
103, 123, 126, 130, 154, 159, 191

Fairchild, Charles G.: on mountain
Me, 66-67; raising money, 142, 157

Fairchild, E. Henry: before 1869, 29-
30; meets college needs, 31-36; on
student labor, 35, 112-13; com-
munity service of, 36; on violence,
37; interracial policy of, 38, 42-43,
44-47, 57; interest in mountain
people, 47, 66-67, 164; degrees
given to graduates, 84; on cur-
riculum, 84-85; administration, 85;
writings, 192, 195

Fairchild Hall. See Ladies' Hall

Faulkner, James P.: 170-71, 174

Fay, Miss Sarah B.: 150-51

Fee, John G.: life before 1855, 2-6;
emphasis on freedom of speech, 2,
4, 7, 18, 20, 83, 143; relations
with Clay, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 18-19;
founding Berea district school, 2,
8; with subscription term, 2, 11-12,
14, 23; founding higher school, 2,
6, 8, 9-10, 12-13, 24, 27-28, 82,
140, 141; relations with A.M.A.,
4, 8, 27-28, 143, 193; writings, 4,

27, 143, 192, 193, 200; description
of, 5, 10, 41, 197; threats against,
7-8, 10, 14; interest in Negroes, 8,
14, 22-24, 41, 42, 57, 64; address
in Brooklyn, 15; during exile, 19,
20-24; as Berea trustee, 86; pref-
erence for Stewart, 143

Fee, Mrs. John G.: 5, 16, 17, 20, 21,
22, 23, 41

Finances, Berea College: land pur-
chase and resale, 2, 13, 20, 24,
140; A.M.A/S influence in, 26-28,

35, 143-44; aid of Freedmen's
Bureau, 32, 141; endowment, 35,

71, 141-42, 144-47, 148, 153-54,
156-57; student aid funds, 35, 54,
141-42, 158-59; sale of utilities,

36, 135, 160; Adjustment Fund,
54-57; co-operation with govern-
mental agencies, 75-76, 160, 171-

72, 175-76, 179, 186-87; financing
education through student labor,
111, 114, 117, 119-22, 124, 159-
60; crises, 142-45, 154-56; Effi-
ciency Fund, 148-49, 153; use of
annual budget, 155-56; sources of
annual income, 157; helpful foun-
dations, 158; concern for staff, 159;
importance of trustees, 161-62

Fire Department: 130, 135, 152, 160

Fireside products: 78, 116-18, 124,
125, 130, 131, 160

Fisk University: 54, 58, 193

Forest Reserve: 149-51

Foundation School: 91, 94, 95, 97,
100, 101, 103

Freedmen's Bureau: 32, 141

French, Mrs. Katherine Jackson: 199-
200

Frost, William G.: interest in Negro
education, 47-48, 52, 53-54, 56,
68-69, 73; interest in mountain
people, 49, 68-74 passim, 83, 92-
94, 168-70; stresses increase of en-
rollment, 69-70, 87, 90, 147; im-
proves publicity, 70-72, 147-49;
writings, 71, 195; concern over
student labor, 73, 91-95, 114-16,
122-26; adapts College to needs,
87-89; develops Normal Depart-
ment, 90-91; develops Vocational
Department, 92-93; removes tui-

214

Index

tion fee, 115; secures finances for
College, 144-49, 153-54; fails in
health, 149; acquires forest reserve,
150-51

Frost, Mrs. William G.: 73-79, 116,
146, 149, 196

General College: 101-102
Gilbert, Miss Kate: 86
Goodell, William: 68
Gould, Miss Helen M.: 147
Graduate study of Berea alumni: 107-

109

Graham, Charles C.: 186, 197
Graves, E. A.: donor, 32, 33
Graves, Rufus R.: donor, 32, 33
Gundlach, Miss Adelaide: registrar,

196
Gymnasium: 104, 106, 129. See also

Seabury Gymnasium; Woods-Pen-

niman Building

Hall, Charles M.: donor, 153-54;
bequest, 154, 155, 157

Hammond, Charles F. : donor, 35, 141,
142

Hampton Institute: 48, 54, 56, 72

Hanson, John G.: 11, 12, 13, 17, 19-
20, 40, 82

Hardin, Rector R.: 197

Hathaway, James S. : 43, 47

Hays, Frank: 68

Health Department: 130

Hill, Mrs. Jennie L.: 90, 117, 118, 122

Home economics, study of: 78, 85, 89,
92, 93, 98, 102-103, 107, 122

Homespun Fair: 117

Honor societies: 106-107

Hospital, Berea College: 77, 93, 104,
122, 146, 149, 192

Howard, General Oliver O.: 28, 32

Howard Hail: 31-32, 104, 141

Howe, Mrs. Julia Ward: 147

Hughes, Justice Charles E.: 148

Hughes, Jerome W.: 197

Hunting, Bruce S.: 72

Hutchins, Francis S.: makes citation
to Bate, 59; works on new admis-
sions policy for Negroes, 60-61;
increases emphasis upon scholar-
ship, 106-109; clarifies Berea's pat-
tern of education, 109, 189, 195;

emphasizes educational factor in
labor, 130-31, 135-36; aided by
increased endowment, 157, 162;
concern over faculty welfare, 159;
increases sharing in rural educa-
tion projects, 186-88; writings, 195
Hutchins, William J.: cultivates inter-
racial understanding, 58-60; ac-
cepts new admissions policy, 80;
makes departmental changes, 95-
103; secures admission to South-
ern Association, 100; improves
physical education program, 105-
106; makes budgetary reform, 155-
56; restates endowment policy,
156-57; sets up pension system for
retiring faculty and nonacademic
workers, 159; encourages co-opera-
tive extension work, 171; interest
in Opportunity School, 181-84 pas-
sim; addresses and articles, 195

Indian Fort: 38, 150

Industrial Trades Building: 120, 122,

131
Intercollegiate sports: 104-106

Jackson, John H.: 43, 197
Jackson, Jordan C.: trustee, 47
Johnson, Mrs. Charles S.: 58
Johnson, James Weldon: 58
Johnston, Mrs. Annie Fellows: 199
Johnston, Miss Mary G.: 199
Jones, H. Clyde: 131-34, 196
Jones, Mrs. H. Clyde: 132-33
Jones, Howard M.: 104
Julian, William A.: trustee, donor,
161-62

Kennedy, John S., and wife: donors,

147
Kentucky State College for Negroes:

43, 54, 60
Kirk, Miss Alice: extension librarian,

166

King, Charles A.: 90
Knapp Hall: training school, 91
Knight, Charles S.: 170, 171

Labor, student:

program: in early Berea, 13, 35,
86, 110; unlike system in previous

Index

215

manual labor colleges, 110-12;
supervision over, 112-13, 123, 134-
35; skilled, 113-14, 115, 118-21,
132-34; evaluating, 113-14, 124,
137-38; productive industries for,
115-22, 124, 126, 130-31; institu-
tional, 122, 124-25, 125-26, 136;
required, 122-23, 125, 126; period
for, 124, 135; increased educa-
tional value of, 124, 127, 131,
136; crisis of, 124-25; present
problems of, 124-27, 132-35;
awards for, 127-28; Labor Day,
127-32; labor for leisure, 129,
138-39

types: in fireside production, 72,
116-18; printing, 113-14, 121, 130;
on farm, 115-16, 124, 130, 136; in
brick, tile, stone working, 118-19,
120; in building Phelps Stokes
Chapel, 119-21; in library, 121,
122; in woodworking, 121, 124,
126, 130, 131; in laundry, 122,
124, 131, 136; in stabilizing in-
dustries, 126-27, 130, 131, 135,
136; in bakery, 131-34, 136; in
outside sales, 131, 136; in candy
kitchen, 132-33;

financial work necessary for: 159-
60

Labor Conference: 126, 127

Ladies* Board of Care: 46, 191

Ladies' HaU: 32-33, 84, 113, 122, 136,
151; renamed Fairchild Hall, 33

Lauder, Mrs. Bertha Fairchild: 197

Laundry: 122, 124

Leadership, training for: 43, 75, 83,
89, 95-96, 98-99

Lewis, Charles D.: 90

Library: in Lincoln Hall, 35; moving
to Carnegie, 121; cabinet work in,
121; institutional labor in, 122,
136; financial report of labor in,
160. See also Carnegie Library
extension work of: early Sunday
school libraries, 163-64; traveling
libraries, 164-65, 166, 167; book
wagon, 165; book car, 165-166,
167; extension room, 166-67;
"extra-mile" service, 167

Liberal arts, education in: 58, 101,
102, 103, 105

Lincoln, William E.: 6, 8, 9, 196
Lincoln HaU: 34-35, 113, 117, 120,

121, 142, 152
Lincoln Institute: 57, 194
Low, Seth: 71
Lower Division: 100, 101

McAllister, Cloyd N.: 76, 91, 97-98

Marsh, Miles E.: first dean of labor,
99, 123-25, 131

Mason, Silas C.: 72, 88, 90, 93, 115-
16, 118, 149-51, 169, 176, 196

Matheny, Francis E.: 89, 105

Middletown Consolidated School
(Negro): 59-60

Miller, John: 105

Model Schools: 89, 90, 92, 93

Monier, Howard B.: 180-81

Montgomery, Frank: 175-76

Morgan, Charles T.: 198

Mountain Day: 37-38, 150

Mountain Life and Work: 203

Mountain people: increased interest
in, 5, 6, 9, 42, 63, 64, 66-67, 68,
70-73, 73-79, 171-72, 178; en-
rolled in Berea, 48, 68, 79-81;
Berea's special field, 60, 63, 70,
72, 73, 79-81, 98; schools of, 64-
65, 70, 74, 86, 90, 97-98, 101, 165,
173, 174, 179, 186-89; houses
of, 65, 67, 70, 72, 77-79, 179, 181;
ballads of, 72, 199; religion of, 65,
76-77, 196; origin of, 65, 67, 71,
78; improving Hfe of, 65, 72, 78,
88, 99-100, 149, 174-78, 179-80;
worth of, 72, 74; need for college-
trained leaders of, 99-100. See
also Extension work

Narrow Gap Settlement School: 91
Needs, adaptations to: 6, 38, 42, 43,
54, 56, 57-58, 61, 67, 73, 76, 78-
79, 81-83, 87, 89, 92-95, 99-100,
102, 123-26, 163-67, 169-71, 174-
75, 176-81, 186-89
Negroes in Berea College:
-1855-1859: 13, 14, 39-40, 42
-1866-1904: admitted, 39-42; social
adjustment of, 40, 44-46; relative
numbers of, 42, 47, 48, 55; alumni
important, 43-44, 47-48; rise of ill-
feeling among, 46, 48-49; Negro

216

Index

trustees, 46-47; issue of Negro
teachers, 47; grants for, 141

1904-1908: segregation law, 1904,
reasons for passage of, 50-51;
terms of law, 51; litigation over
law, 52-53; Berea's aid to ex-
cluded students, 53-54; Adjust-
ment Fund for Lincoln Institute,
54-57

1908-1950: interracial education,
57-60

1950- : legal readmission, 60-61;
lessons learned on interracial edu-
cation, 62

"New Endowment": 142
Nursing, School of: 61, 93, 96, 98

Oberlin influence: 6, 8, 9, 29-30, 32,

47, 111, 144, 153, 155, 168
Okolona Industrial College: 59
'"Old Endowment": 142
Opportunity School: 181-85, 198
Osborne, Thomas J.: treasurer, 138,
144

Pearsons, Dr. D. K.: donor, 71, 145-

47, 148, 150-52, 199
Pearsons Hall: 146
Penniman, Henry M.: financial agent,

148, 151

Pettit, Miss Catherine, 171
Phelps Stokes, Miss Olivia E.: donor,

119-20

Phelps Stokes Chapel. See Chapel
Phi Delta Literary Society: 45, 198
Physical education: 103-106
Pierrepont, Seth Low: trustee, 194
Pine Mountain Settlement School: 187
Print, Students* Job: 113-14, 121
Prudential Committee: 13, 36, 79, 85,

143, 156, 191
Pulasld County school improvement

project: 186-87

RawMngs, Hamilton: 6, 10, 15
Raymond, C. Rexford: 168-70
Renfro, Thomas J.: early trustee,

treasurer, 10, 12, 13, 20
Ridgway, Mrs. Florence H.: librarian,

165, 166

Robinson, Miss Josephine, 72
Rogers, J. A. R.: early school of, 2,

8, 9-12, 14-16, 42; relation to
A.M.A., 9, 26, 27, 28; work on
constitution, 12, 82; during exile,
16-17, 21-22, return to Berea, 40,
41; on mountain journey, 63-65;
on manual labor department, 111;
dedicatory prayer, 121; writings,
192, 193-94

Rogers, Mrs. J. A. R.: 9, 10, 15-17, 41,
121, 194

Rogers, J. R.: trustee, donor, 194

Roosevelt, Theodore: 147

Scaffold Cane Community School: 76,
91-92

Scholarship Day: 106-107

Science Building: 100

Seabury Gymnasium: 106

Senior College, 101, 102

Shaler, Nathaniel S.: 71

Shutt, Charles N.: 102, 196

Smith, Frank H.: 197

Smith, Gerrit: 8, 40, 82, 140, 142

Smith, John F.: 90

Smith, Kirke: 55

Smith, Louis: 196

Smith, Roswell: donor, 34-35, 142

Southern Association of Colleges and
Secondary Schools: 100, 102, 159

Spence, Robert F.: 176-78, 180

Stapp, William: 10, 12

Stewart, William B.: 47, 143, 195

Stone, Mrs. Valeria G.: early donor,
142

Student life: financial concern for, 35-
36, 112, 141-42, 158-59; social
life, 37-38, 45, 101, 139, 145-46,
150; interracial, 38, 44-45, 46, 49,
52, 58, 61-62; homesickness in,
77-78; training for leadership, 83;
satisfaction in labor, 113-14, 137-
38; publications, 198, 200, 201-
202

Tabernacle: 31, 54, 129, 145

Tappan, Lewis: 142

Teacher training: 8, 43, 66, 76, 82,

85, 89-92, 97, 102, 186-89
Thomson, A. E.: 57, 194
True American: 4, 18, 193
Trustees: 12, 24, 29, 34, 40, 46-47,

52, 53, 54, 60, 79, 86, 87, 93, 99,

Index

217

104, 114, 140-41, 144, 147, 150,

152, 154, 155, 161-62
Tuition: 35, 115, 141, 158-59
Tuskegee Industrial Institute: 54, 72

Upper Division: 100

Vaughn, Marshall E.: 171, 179, 195

Washington Berea meeting (1915): 72
Waters, Otis B.: 8, 10, 196
Waterworks: 78, 120, 149-52, 160
Wear, Pat W.: 197

Weidler, Albert G.: dean of labor,

125-29 passim, 138, 195-96
Weld, Theodore D.: 30, 110-11
Westervelt Shop: 138-39, 197
Wheeler, W. W., and wife: 40-41
White, E. F.: 197
Wilson, Woodrow: speaks for Berea

CoUege, 71, 72, 147, 148-49
Woods-Penniman Building: 106
Woolwine purchase: 13, 20, 24, 140

Yocum, Mrs. Eliza H.: 72, 90

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ELISABETH 8. PECK for more than a generation
lias been a vital pait of the college life of Beiea
students. A year after receiving the Ph.D. tie-
giee at the University of Michigan in 1911, Mis.
Peck came to Berea. In 1914 she married John
N. Peck, a Berea mathematics teacher, who died
in 1948. During her forty-one years as a teacher
of history at Berea, she visited in most of the
mountain counties of Kentucky. The day after
she retired as chairman of the History and Poli-
tical Science Department, she became college
historian An experienced author her American
Frontier was published in 1937 and Tibh's
Floodcn- in 1940 she has spent the past two
years hard at work among the college archives.

Chimes Tower drawing b\j Janis K. Stembvrgs
At? VT?MTTTriTY PRF.SS

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