"A day-dream of the Hampton School, nearly as it is, had come to me during the war a few times; once in camp during the siege of Richmond, and once one beautiful evening on the Gulf of Mexico, while on the wheel-house of the transport steamship Illinois, enroute for Texas with the 25th Army Corps (Negro) for frontier duty on the Rio Grande River, whither it had been ordered, under General Sheridan, to watch and if necessary defeat Maximilian in his attempted conquest of Mexico.
"The thing to be done was clear: to train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people, first by example by getting land and homes; to give them not a dollar that they could earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor; to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands; and, to these ends, to build up an industrial system, for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character. And it seemed equally clear that the people of the country would support a wise work for the freedmen."
HAMPTON INSTITUTE, 1868.
Thus, under a man of the broadest views and almost prophetic foresight, the school had its beginning. Two teachers and fifteen students found living room and class room in the dismantled mansion, the old brick mill and the newer barracks, relics of the slavery days and of the civil war. At the end of the school's twenty-fifth year Gen. Armstrong died, seeing, as it is given to few to see, great and tangible results from his years of self-sacrificing labor. Since his death, the work has been carried on by Rev. H. B. Frissell, D. D., who has taken up with wisdom and courage the task laid upon him and has a record behind him now of five years, during which the institution has shown steady growth and improvement.
HAMPTON INSTITUTE, 1898.
At the beginning of the present year there were on the grounds 1,001 students; of these 135 are Indians representing ten States and Territories; 361 are children coming from the immediate neighborhood, who are instructed in the Whittier Primary School. There are 630 boarders—383 boys and 247 girls. Of the eighty officers, teachers, and assistants, about one-half are in the industrial department.
TRADE SCHOOL BUILDING.