The teachers contribute a portion of their salaries to our "Student Aid Fund" and other causes for the promotion of the work.
The work of elevating the plantation life of the Negro is one of the most important connected with the work of education in the South. It is hard for the schools to reach these people. Hence the importance of special effort in this direction. Normal has organized to meet the demand. Young women are trained especially for this work. Those who will dedicate their lives to this work on the plantation, to work regardless of pay, have all of their expenses paid in school while they are in preparation. Normal hopes to do much in this line.
A CLASS IN COOKING.
The young men are also organized for Sunday-school Mission Work. Many of them walk five to ten miles every Sabbath, to organize and conduct Sunday schools. Everywhere they go, school-houses are built and repaired, homes are refined and general intelligence scattered among the people. The ingenuity displayed by these young men to overcome the poverty which confronts them in their work is quite remarkable. One of them bought Sunday-school literature and started a library, on a collection of one egg each Sunday, from those who could afford to make such a contribution.
The U. S. Government has made Normal a Weather Service Station, and the signals are read by the farmers for miles away. Normal has a brass band, also an excellent string band.
Prof. W. H. Councill owns a farm adjoining Normal, and occupying a portion of the triangle between the two great railroad lines approaching each other after passing on either side of Normal. He has laid a portion of this land off in lots, streets, avenues, alleys, and gives the odd numbers to bona fide settlers, who will build a specified house, and subscribe to certain other conditions, such as keeping up fences, streets, sidewalks, etc. Men who can turn their brains and muscles into things of use are encouraged to settle here.
PRESIDENT W. H. COUNCILL.
W. H. Councill was born in Fayetteville, N. C., in 1848, and brought to Alabama by the traders in 1857, through the famous Richmond Slave Pen. He is a self-made man, having had only few school advantages. He attended one of the first schools opened by kind Northern friends at Stevenson, Ala., in 1865. Here he remained about three years, and this is the basis of his education. He has been a close and earnest student ever since, often spending much of the night in study. He has accumulated quite an excellent library and the best books of the best masters are his constant companions, as well as a large supply of the best current literature. By private instruction and almost incessant study, he gained a fair knowledge of some of the languages, higher mathematics and the sciences. He read law and was admitted to the Supreme Court of Alabama in 1883. But he has never left the profession of teaching for a day, although flattering political positions have been held out to him. He has occupied high positions in church and other religious, temperance and charitable organizations, and has no mean standing as a public speaker. And thus by earnest toil, self-denial, hard study, he has made himself, built up one of the largest institutions in the South and educated scores of young people at his own expense.
