MISSISSIPPI.
Tougaloo University—Its Location, Work, Equipments, Success and Needs.
REV. G. STANLEY POPE.
The immediate surroundings of Tougaloo University are, perhaps, the most beautiful of any of our schools. At the same time it has seemed for the past three years to be a very healthful location. The school has been unusually full during the past year, and the work in the school-room has been most thorough. I have had associated with me a very competent and willing corps of workers. Their work has been every thing I could ask for. We attempt to give only a thorough, practical Normal training in our school, feeling that this meets the present necessities of the colored people of our State. We are willing to take the rough stone from the quarry and put on the heavy, telling strokes of the builder, and leave the more artistic strokes of the sculptor to be given by some of our sister institutions. A peculiar and interesting feature of our school-room work is the study of the Bible in the class-room. This is done to give a special preparation for Sunday-school work.
We have sufficient apparatus for illustrating physics, but beyond this we are poorly supplied with school-room conveniencies. We have but a limited supply of models, maps and charts, while our library consists mostly of Congressional documents.
A peculiar feature of the work at Tougaloo is the training given the students in gardening, farming, stock-raising and housework. Already the shipment of strawberries to the Chicago market is proving a rich remuneration to student labor. Our clover field is a wonder to the students and neighboring planters, and our fine blooded cattle not much less of a surprise. These industries are opening up new avenues of livelihood as well as usefulness to our students. Many of our young women have been but field hands, so that the work about the house and in the sewing room is a new kind of labor to them.
We have been able to do nothing, comparatively, in the church work. No churches have been organized as the outgrowth of our school. There are communities ripe for such work if we only had the means to carry it on. There are points along the lines of railroad that could be supplied by students if we only had a theological class to put to work in organizing and carrying on church work. We have not neglected the Sunday-school work because we have not been able to do all that we have wanted, but have visited schools and held some conventions. The influence of these conventions is being felt in the surrounding country.
The exodus affects our school but little thus far. The effect of the movement upon the colored people themselves has not been such as to warrant us in encouraging it in any way. Many of the patrons of our school have secured small farms and are in a way to give their families a fair education. Our school is becoming more widely known and its influence more powerfully felt. Parents came two hundred miles to see their sons graduate last June. Applications have been crowding in upon us for accommodations next year.
Our buildings are far from supplying our necessities. We have comfortable accommodations for sixty-four boarders, and some of the time we have had one hundred and eight. We have unfinished and merely temporary rooms for thirty others, but instead of one hundred boarders we ought to have two hundred, and might readily have if we but had rooms.
During the year we had a most precious revival, embracing nearly all in our normal and preparatory departments. Our work seems limited only by the lack of means to furnish room for those desirous of coming.