THE WORK AT BEREA.
Nestling in a charming “glade,” overshadowed by the North-western foot-hills of the mighty Appalachian mountain world, is Berea College. It is not exclusively a school for teachers, but includes the entire organization of popular education from an effective primary school up to a solid university class of twenty-five, with a normal course for instruction in methods of teaching. Its pupils are of both sexes and colors, and another year may possibly witness the white, negro and Indian quietly at work in the same class-rooms, with no rivalry except the honest pride to excel in good scholarship and manly or womanly character. But in this, for the South, exceptional feature, there comes in the most interesting peculiarity of this most “peculiar institution.” With a few exceptions from the North and the blue-grass region of Kentucky, the white students come from the great mountain country that overlooks the college campus. This region, in Kentucky, includes a country as extensive as the whole State of New Hampshire, and not unlike it in shape. Here, in a mountain world, divided into thirty counties, out of hearing of the railroad whistle, in many parts traversed only on horseback, with no village containing five thousand and very few one thousand people, dwells a population of nearly two hundred thousand, more thoroughly isolated from the New America than the settlers in Oregon or the latest hamlet in Dakota. Living almost entirely from the land, in the narrowest way, on narrow means, with few tolerable schools and a good deal of intolerable preaching, with an almost total destitution of books, newspapers and ordinary means of cultivation, completely shut off from social contact with the ruling class of the State, this people is peculiar in many ways.
Out from this interesting region come the majority of the white students of Berea. Few of them are able even to meet the yearly sum of seventy-five dollars, for which their education is given them. Many of them, even the girls, walk from their homes, and come in with nothing but a stout suit of clothes, a good head and a brave heart, paying their way as they go by such work as turns up, and the small wages of mountain school-keeping in the long summer vacations. They have no leisure to discuss the vexed topic of co-education that worries grave professors and doubting students at Yale and Harvard; indeed, the young fellow not unfrequently brings in his sister, cousin and prospective “annex” to sit down at the same table of knowledge. He is more anxious to lift his own end of a problem than to quarrel with the colored boy who is tugging at the other end. Indeed, at Berea one seems to be in that ideal university where an overpowering desire for study lifts the entire body of students above a whole class of questions that even yet convulse politicians and people, schoolmen and churches, South and North. They live together; the girls, of course, under careful supervision; study, work, recite, play and worship together; students and teachers, children and grown men and women, in one family. Probably no American school of three hundred and seventy students goes through the year with so little disturbance, is so easily governed, or so generally absorbed in the work in hand. This year the faculty consists of thirteen professors and teachers under President E. H. Fairchild, and three hundred and sixty-nine students, of whom nine are in the college classical and twenty-five in the literary course, forty-five in the normal, and the remainder in the preparatory department. The average age is sixteen. Two hundred and forty-nine are colored and one hundred and twenty are white; two hundred and six males and one hundred and sixty-three females.
The instruction is excellent, probably equal in quality to any school in the State; and the proficiency of the pupils remarkable, considering their previous estate. The primary school-room contains twenty stout fellows ranging from eighteen to twenty-five years of age; but it is not uncommon for one of these boys to go forth as a tolerable school-master among the colored people after two years’ hard work at Berea. Indeed, if one were to look for signs of mental power, he need not go outside the beautiful campus of this school. We positively never witnessed such progress in learning as is the common talk among these teachers. These stalwart young men and resolute maidens from the mountains buckle to their books with a will that knows no discouragement. They go back to their homes to become the pride of their friends and the hope of their neighborhood. Nearly every student is a member of the church and the temperance society, and the carrying of arms is cause of expulsion. All classes of the Southern people are good listeners. We never addressed an audience of three hundred people that put us more decisively on our mettle than the crowd of students and villagers that did us the favor to crowd the chapel on four unpleasant nights to listen to our talks on education.
We do not propose to defend Berea against any objector. A school with such tough Kentucky roots as Fee, Hanson, and their compeers; with a history so romantic in its heroic past and so startling in its recent growth; with a foundation on three hundred acres of “sacred soil,” two hundred thousand dollars worth of excellent buildings, in a situation unrivaled in beauty; a faculty representing the best culture and character of the North-west, with the rising ability of the South; and a population of five hundred friendly people within sound of chapel bells; can be trusted to plead its own cause against all comers. It is already commending itself to many of the best people of Kentucky, receiving students from families of highest respectability in the neighborhood, and on commencement days the great tabernacle is crammed with three thousand people, from the humblest to the highest in the proud old State. Berea is a great American fact, comprehensible only to a man who has read, pondered and inwardly digested the Sermon on the Mount and its corollary, the Constitution of the United States. If no similar college should ever exist, this will live in its own place in American history, a splendid evidence of the power of a consecrated education to bind together all sorts and conditions of good women and earnest men.—Dr. Mayo in Journal of Education.
SOWING IN TEARS AND REAPING IN JOY—BEREA COLLEGE.
REV. J. A. R. ROGERS.
The rule is that a long time must elapse between the sowing and the reaping. Abraham’s patience in Canaan for long years seemed destined to be fruitless in those things which God had promised him; not a foot of Canaan did he own, and he was still childless; his faith was tried to the uttermost, and only by a great struggle was he kept from despair. After centuries, that sowing began to produce a harvest, not yet but partially reaped. The recent addition of $50,000 to the endowment of Berea College calls to mind the long, weary days of struggle and almost despair in its early history. The apparent success for a time, to be followed by every sort of discouragement, was not the least of the trials of those whose labors were the occasion for Berea College. Churches were formed, and many seemed heartily in favor of the Gospel of Christ, which commands and secures love; and then persecutions would arise, and such a perfect torrent of public opinion against the “abolitionists,” that large numbers would succumb to the adverse influences, and the love of many would wax cold. Again, such persecutions would arise, that for a time only women were regarded as safe in attending the preaching services of Mr. Fee and others. After the school was started in 1858, which culminated in Berea College, there were still those great alternations of prosperity and apparent defeat which are so hard to bear. One term, large numbers of students would come, including the children of slaveholders, and the next, only those would apply for admission who could endure the reproach of being called “nigger lovers.” Even after the war, when two or three colored children entered the primary department, there was such a stampede from every department, that the principal, in sorrow, said to the few that timidly remained, “Will ye also go away?”
Those years from ’55 to ’66 were years of sowing in great sorrow. The missionaries of the A. M. A. were very poor; their salaries were $400 per year, and some of that sum must be expended for those still poorer. They lived in almost constant terror of their lives. If for any cause they were north of the Ohio River for a few weeks, they breathed such a free atmosphere that it seemed almost like getting into Heaven. By many they were regarded with suspicion and contempt. The writer remembers what cringing of the nerves he often had to endure, in walking the streets of one of the central towns of Kentucky. People would stare at him as if he were a hyena let loose. It is not easy to describe what were the sorrows of those years, the greatest of which was that so many professed friends fell away in time of danger, and that so many bearing the name of Christ at those times were ready to deny their faith.