The story reached the ears of a lady not far away. After that she began reading Bible stories to the mountain children gathered at a little log cabin near her home. “Martha Berry didn’t need eye specs to see how eager the children were for learning,” one of her mountain friends remarked, “and then and there she began to ruminate through her mind a way to help them help themselves. ‘Not to be ministered unto, but to minister,’ that was what Martha Berry said from the very first and that is still the motto of the great institution that has steadily grown up from the humble beginning in a little one-room log house.”
It is an unusual institution of learning with a campus equally unique, for in its 25,000 acres are a forest, a mountain, and a lake and more than one hundred buildings which were not only erected by Berry students, but built from materials also made by them. Here mountain boys and girls express the fine spirit of independence inherited from their forbears. Once they enter the Gate of Opportunity, they earn their education. The mountain boy, with his carpentry, brick-making, stock-raising, hand-carving, matches his skill in friendly rivalry with the girl, in her spinning and weaving, making dyes and canning fruits. In one year the girls canned 50,000 gallons of fruit grown within the boundary of the Berry Schools.
Boys and girls of the Georgia mountains need not despair nor be backward while the “Sunday Lady of Possum Trot” keeps open the Gate of Opportunity to the Berry Schools.
“There’s a heap of change here in these mountains for our children. If a child’s afflicted in its nether limbs, it don’t need to lay helpless no more, a misery to itself and everyone else. There’s the waters of Warm Springs and doctors with knowing that are there to help them on foot,” a mountain mother told me last winter when I stopped at her cabin. “Take the night,” she urged. “You can get a soon start in the morning, if you choose.” I accepted her hospitality and she told me much of her early life there and of crippled children of the mountains who had been restored through bloodless surgery. Of one boy in particular she told who for long years had never walked a step until he had been brought to the healing salt waters. “He can drive a car now and climb a mountain on foot. He drove an old couple that had bought a new car all the way from Warm Springs plum acrost the State of Georgia and back again so’s he could travel the Franklin D. Roosevelt Highway. It give him something to brag about when he got back home.” The old woman lifted her eyes to the hills reflectively. “There have been a heap of people in this country who stood in the light of their afflicted children claiming it was the Good Lord’s will that they were so and that it was a deep-dyed sin to try to change them. Some claimed it was a sin against the Holy Ghost to carve upon their crooked little limbs and shed their life’s blood even though it might make them to walk. Folks with such notions as that are plum in benighted darkness. But times have changed and it’s learning and good roads that make it. Nohow, there are doctors now with a heap of learning who can straighten twisted joints of crippled children and never shed their life’s blood. Not nary drop!” The old woman’s eyes widened with incredulity. “I’ve seen crippled children packed away on a slide plum helpless and come back home on foot as spry as a wren and never a scar on their flesh. They’ve got knowing ways off yonder to Warm Springs where the doctors and nurse women, to lend a hand, straighten out the twisted little bodies of many a crippled child. They do say it is a sight to the world how them little crippled fellers can cavort around in the salty waters in no time, playful as minner fish in a sunny mountain brook. And they never shed a drop of their life’s blood. So you see there’s always a way around a mountain if you can’t climb over it. And by these new ways of learning the doctors and the nurse women are not breaking faith with the belief of mountain people. It’s a great and a glorious gospel, I tell you!”
If you climb to the top of a peak in Dug Down Mountains, a spur of the Blue Ridge that dwindles to a height of 1000 feet in southeastern Alabama, and take a look at the state—provided the binoculars are strong enough-you’ll see why there’s a saying down in that country to the effect that “Alabama could sleep with her head resting upon the iron-studded hills of her mineral district, her arms stretched across fields of food and raiment, and her feet bathing in the placid waters of Mobile Bay.”
This Cornucopia of the South is not sleeping, however; she is on her feet and bestirring herself and aware of her almost limitless resources.
“She could dig beneath her surface and find practically every chemical element required in the prosecution of modern war.... She could fire her guns with 7,529,090 pounds of explosives produced annually in her mineral mines.... In her hour of victory, she could declare herself the Queen of the Commonwealth, mold her diadem with gold from Talladega, and embellish it with rubies from the bed of the Coosa that drains the Dug Down foothills of the Blue Ridge.”
In short, her native sons like to boast, “Alabama could isolate herself from all the world and live happily forever after.”
And lest they forget the past, the first White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis lived and ruled, still stands, a grim reminder of the old South.