[Footnote 1: Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 379.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., 1871, p. 379.]
Some of the philanthropists who promoted the practical education of the colored people were found in the Negro settlements of the Northwest. Their first successful attempt in that section was the establishment of the Emlen Institute in Mercer County, Ohio. The founding of this institution was due manly to the efforts of Augustus Wattles who was instrumental in getting a number of emigrating freedmen to leave Cincinnati and settle in this county about 1835.[1] Wattles traveled in almost every colored neighborhood of the State and laid before them the benefits of permanent homes and the education for their children. On his first journey he organized, with the assistance of abolitionists, twenty-five schools for colored children. Interested thereafter in providing a head for this system he purchased for himself ninety acres of land in Mercer County to establish a manual labor institution. He sustained a school on it at his own expense, till the 11th of November, 1842. Wattles then visited Philadelphia where he became acquainted with the trustees of the late Samuel Emlen, a Friend of New Jersey. He had left by his will $20,000 "for the support and education in school learning and mechanic arts and agriculture of boys of African and Indian descent whose parents would give such youths to the Institute."[2] The means of the two philanthropists were united. The trustees purchased a farm and appointed Wattles as superintendent of the establishment, calling it Emlen Institute. Located in a section where the Negroes had sufficient interest in education to support a number of elementary schools, this institution once had considerable influence.[3] It was removed to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1858 and then to Warminster in the same county in 1873.
[Footnote 1: Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 355.]
[Footnote 2: Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 356.]
[Footnote 3: Wickersham, History of Education in Pa., p. 254.]
Another school of this type was founded in the Northwest. This was the Union Literary Institute of Spartanburg, Indiana. The institution owes its origin to a group of bold, antislavery men who "in the heat of the abolition excitement"[1] stood firm for the Negro. They soon had opposition from the proslavery leaders who impeded the progress of the institution. But thanks to the indefatigable Ebenezer Tucker, its first principal, the "Nigger School" weathered the storm. The Institute, however, was founded to educate both races. Its charter required that no distinction should be made on account of race, color, rank, or religion. Accordingly, although the student body was from the beginning of the school partly white, the board of trustees represented denominations of both races. Accessible statistics do not show that colored persons ever constituted more than one-third of the students.[2] It was one of the most durable of the manual labor schools, having continued after the Civil War, carrying out to some extent the original designs of its founders. As the plan to continue it as a private institution proved later to be impracticable the establishment was changed into a public school.[3]
[Footnote 1: Boone, The History of Education in Indiana, p. 77.]
[Footnote 2: According to the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education in 1893 the colored students then constituted about one-third of those then registered at this institution. See p. 1944 of this report.]
[Footnote 3: Records of the United States Bureau of Education.]