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N a certain day in May if you are anywhere in Montgomery County, Alabama, you will see wagons from the country, cars and carriages from the city, crowding and jamming along the road, all going in one direction. On inquiry you will learn that they are making their way toward the Mt. Meigs Institute, to attend the commencement exercises. When you reach the school, there will break on you a sort of vision of a new city, suddenly peopled. This is the work of Miss Cornelia Bowen of Mt. Meigs.
Miss Bowen went to Mt. Meigs in 1888 to plant a school in the wilderness, as it were. To reach the rural man and woman as well as the small boy and small girl was a demand which both Miss Bowen and the late Dr. Washington felt it a sacred duty to answer. To use Miss Bowen's own words in "Tuskegee and Its People" "a call reached Dr. Washington in 1888 for a teacher to begin work in the vicinity of Mt. Meigs, Alabama, similar to the work done at Tuskegee, but of course on a smaller scale. Mr. E. N. Pierce of Plainville, Connecticutt, had resolved to do something in the way of providing better school facilities for the colored people living on a large plantation, into the possession of which he had come. Mr. Washington answered the call while in Boston, and telegraphed me that he thought me the proper person to take charge of and carry on the settlement work Mr. Pierce and his friend had in mind."
The place itself is far away, out of contact. The people were weighted down with debt, mild peon age, morals were at a low ebb. Miss Bowen set out to improve the lives of the old people while building a school for the young. She taught Bible classes in the leaky country church and held meetings and conferences for the mothers and fathers. In a little while the people began to know that there were ideals of health, of family, of property ownership. Thus it is that today they troop on horseback, in buggy, in wagon to Mt. Meigs Commencement. Here along with the diversion offered they come upon the first impulse to do good.
It has become quite common nowadays to speak of the pioneer, but the Mt. Meigs school was in a very real sense a pioneer in its own kind of work. To set up in the country a school which was a community center : a school which called in the country women to teach them cooking, sewing, and house-keeping, to teach them how to rear and treat their children ; to instruct them in finer manners towards their husbands and towards their neighbors; to persuade them to eliminate certain habits, like dipping snuff and smoking and chewing tobacco, as unfeminine and un-womanly; to have done all this in those early days of any kind of Negro school in Alabama was genuinely pioneer work.
The same constructive program was adopted with the men and boys. Men were better farmers, better husbands, fathers, cleaner in their habits, more ambitious in their ideals because of Mt. Meigs. They formed more definite ideals of home, of family, of church, from this teaching and from their contact in the school. Where there was no farm ownership, they began to buy farms. Where there were no flowers, flowers began to grow: an air of refinement and of taste began to assert itself.
There is nothing so new about this now, for we begin to see the very definite results of this training. Mt. Meigs opened a boarding department and rooms for the children and taught them new lessons of life. It fired them with zeal to go back to their village and teach what they themselves had learned. This situation now so prevalent was at first a most startling innovation when Mt. Meigs began. It was the first trumpet call to the man in the fields that somebody really cared for him, for the life he lived, whether or not he was really happy.
While thus laboring among the elders, Miss Bowen was founding a school. She bought her land, forty-odd acres, and began to put up buildings. She put on the curriculum, not only grammar, arithmetic and the like, but the study of practical industries, such trades as the boys and girls could
use immediately in their homes. Thus she teaches her own school gardening, farming, poultry-raising, the care of live stock and bee-culture.
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