MISS HALLIE Q. BROWN.
BY F. S. DELANY.
Hallie Quinn Brown is a native of Pittsburg, Pa. When quite small her parents moved to a farm near Chatham, West Ontario, Canada. At an early age, in the year 1868, she was sent to Wilberforce College, Ohio, to obtain an education the country schools of Canada could not give, and where her parents subsequently moved, and now reside at Homewood Cottage. She completed the classical scientific course in 1873, with the degree of B.S. in a class of six. One of her classmates is the wife of Rev. B. F. Lee, D.D., ex-President of Wilberforce. Realizing that a great field of labor lay in the South, Miss Brown, with true missionary spirit, left her pleasant home and friends to devote herself to the noble work she had chosen.
Her first school was on a plantation in South Carolina, where she endured the rough life as best she could, and taught a large number of children from neighboring plantations. She also taught a class of aged people, and by this means gave to many the blessed privilege of reading the Bible. She next took charge of a school on Sonora Plantation, in Mississippi, where she found the effort to elevate the minds of the people much hindered by the use of tobacco and whisky—twin vices.
But as she is an indefatigable worker she accomplished much, and at this place, as at all others where she is known, her influence for the better is felt. Her plantation school had no windows, but it was well ventilated; too much so, in fact, for daylight could be seen from all sides, with no particular regularity, and the rain beat in fiercely. Not being successful in getting the authorities to fix the building—shed, we should have said—she secured the willing service of two of her larger boys. She mounted one mule and the two boys another, and thus they rode to the ginhouse. They got cotton seed, returned, mixed it with earth, which formed a plastic mortar, and with her own hands she pasted up the chinks, and ever after smiled at the unavailing attacks of wind and weather.
