LCRBMRP-T1903

Some Interesting Things at Hampton Institute

HELEN W. LUDLOW"We haven't much time; show us just the most interesting things," says a tourist who has driven up from Old Point to see the famous school for Negroes and Indians.

The student guide casts an experienced eye over his party, and leads the way according to his estimate of their probable preferences.

Perhaps it is to the Trade School, which is in itself an epitome of Hampton's central idea of "learning by doing." Here, in one long room musical with the symphony of saws and planes, we find perhaps some twenty young fellows--red men and brown--each at his bench, working out his problem of the carpenter's trade from a blue print pattern before him. Or the class may be employed outside the door, in putting up a model frame house of several rooms in two stories. Looking down the long vista of busy, intent young workmen and thinking what it all means for them and their races, it will not be strange if the visitor's thoughts stray away to that little shop in Galilee where were laid the foundation beams of altruistic work of man for man.

The wheelwright shop, whose finished achievements meet us on the school grounds and the country roads, and the fascinating turning shop, with its whirling lines of beauty 00054and its balsamic odors of pine and cedar, complete the wood-working round of the Trade School. Then there is the great hall of the masons and plasterers, whose handsome arches and massive walls and chimneys and towers seem lifting themselves for all time, but shall vanish "like the baseless fabric of a vision," in order that the next year's classmay try its `prentice hand. The machine shop has more room for permanent products, and some of its ponderous steam lathes and drills have been constructed by former student journeymen. The historic charm of the smoke-wreathed "smithy" is multiplied here by twenty glowing forges with their streaming sparks and ringing anvil chorus. The engine room, the shoe and harness, tin and paint shops present their 00065various attractions. In the mechanical-drawing room, students of every trade have special training. We shall find some of them doing beautiful work, drawing plans and original designs to be wrought out in the shops from blue-print copies which are also prepared by students hands. Among the instructors and managers of these shops, we shall find graduates of Hampton and other educated colored men, with Northern, Southern and sometimes European white mechanics.

But learning by doing means more at Hampton than mere sample work. Every trade shop has its business adjunct, for the three-fold purpose of supplying that training in real life which is one of the greatest needs of these people, giving the students a chance to work their way to an education otherwise beyond their reach, and, above all, securing for them the essence of all true education, character-building, by responsibility and self-help.

So we may find a trade school-room empty, its advanced class out on some contract work for the neighborhood. Every building on the grounds is representative, to a great extent, of student labor in construction and furnishing.

Seventy-five per cent of all outside and inside work upon a recently and handsomely finished private residence was done by thestudent-mechanics. They have done almost all that upon the new large addition to the girls' building, which has been named by its donors "Cleveland Hall," in memory of the well-known educator and early champion of freedom, the late Charles Dexter Cleveland of Philadelphia.

If the guide conducts his party to the most extensive representative of the school's productive industries, the Huntington Industrial Works, he may find it hard to entice them away from the fascination of watching the big logs from North Carolina forests humping themselves out 00076of the water and gliding up the steep incline to their manifest destiny. By way of band saw and dry-kiln, plane, buzzsaw and chisel, they achieve the ends of utility and art, while the sturdy fellows who direct their course are getting their own share of the evolution wrought by toil and change.

Perhaps the visitors will view one stage of that evolution in a class-room of newly arrived aborigines, whose tongues are probably not more paralyzed by the stranger's entrance than his own might be if called on for an after-dinner speech at the court of the Kaiser or Shah.

Perhaps another stage of the evolution aforesaid will be found interesting in another class-room, where Negro and Indian young men and women are conducting laboratory experiments in chemistry or physics, applied to problems of the farm, the kitchen or the work shop; or, it may be, discussing the news from Manila and China, or questions of economics or pedagogy. In any class-room he may enter, the visitor fresh from Northern normal schools and teachers' colleges will find evidence that Hampton means to keep its methods and their application and results well up with the times.

The Building of Domestic Science and Agriculture, which is one of the latest additions to the school's facilities for industrial training, has attractions for almost any class of visitors. In its dairy, they may compare the processes of the old-fashioned churn and the magical modern cream "separator," and test for themselves, in the old-fashioned way, the "gilt-edged" product of the operations of white-clad young dairymen, whose fathers' idea of a cow was of game to be lassoed and shot for rations. In another ground-floor room, the Juno-eyed Jersey or Holstein herself may be found, calmly contemplating the inquisitive boys and girls who are making notes of her points as milker or butter-yielder. 00087In the lecture-room and laboratory, young women as well as young men will be found interested students of soil formation and plant life. What a Hampton girl may know of farming and poultry raising and kitchen gardening, has already often proved a transforming influence in communities of her people. A cooking class is always attractive from afar. If Hampton's is much like others the visitors may have seen, but for picturesque variety of coloring, that fact will hardly be counted to its discredit. The neat little dining-room and pretty bed-room in the Domestic Science suite are designed both for model and practice school for the young house-keepers. The visitor's interest in the latter may suddenly rise on hearing that girls' hands have constructed the ingenious box-framed toilet stand, wash-stand and corner seat, have enameled the chairs and table, upholstered the lounge and made and laundered all the snowy draperies of windows, bed and furniture. A sewing class is not very picturesque, but here every girl at Hampton learns 00098to make and repair her own simple wardrobe. Her graduating gown must be made by her own hands. If she would fit herself to teach the art, as many have done, taking charge of girls' industries in some school for her people, she has special training in dressmaking and the duties of a matron.

A greater novelty to the visitor will be the classes in basket making and carpet weaving, old-fashioned arts still to be turned to advantage in country districts of the South and West. Another novelty may be the sloyd class, where girls' hands acquire a sleight which has subtle reaction upon brain power and character, as well as an obvious relation to the needs of broken benches and dilapidated country schoolhouses. Most novel of all, no doubt, is the class in which Indian maidens are learning, in order to impart it to their people, the beautiful art of pillow-lace making which has been introduced by Miss Sybil Carter, with such wonderful results, into the Indian villages of the Northwest.

And now, if the visitors have a carriage as well as time and wisdom at their disposal, the guide will be able to persuade them to take a twenty minutes' drive to the Whittier training school and back, over the school farm. Now they will pass a squad of student workmen who after ploughing all day will be grateful for the chance to put in an hour and a half of a good honest work in the night-school. An observation class, note book in hand, may be studying roots and soils along a convenient ditch. The guide will be sure to point out the little model barn and silo on the four-acre enclosure where the boys learn what can be done on a small scale when they start in life. If the Whittier school children--and expecially the kindergarten pickaninnies--are out with their little rakes and hoes in the garden beds, of which each one is a proud proprietor, the visitor's horses will have a good long rest, for that is a sight worth seeing. And within the Whittier school doors are others as interesting, 00109though the hour is past for the most impressive scene of all, the children's morning song and salute to Old Glory.

Returning, the party will have a glance into the beautiful Memorial Church. Its quiet atmosphere seems sunlit with the presences of generous lives, and the pictured face of Hampton's founder father beams undying inspiration from the flag-wreathed easel on the platform. There may be still time for a look into the library, reading-room and the collection of Indian curios, and at the beautiful specimens of student cabinet work which furnish the room where the visitors will register their names and be supplied ad libitum with Hampton literature. Here, too, 001110one may reinforce or supplement the impression of his views of Hampton, by looking through the series of fine photographs of all departments of the school, which won it the prix d' honneur from the Paris Exposition of 1900.

A tour through Hampton, whether brief or extended, is likely to end with the battalion's march to dinner and the climax of the chanted grace.

Possibly, with that climax, which seems apt to send a sympathetic thrill from the heart to the eyes of the visitor, the idea may come to him, if it has not before, of a fact to which the keen-eyed young guide, who now doffs his cap in farewell to his personally conducted party, has failed to call their attention, being himself unconscious of it. And that is the fact that of all the interesting things to be seen and studied at Hampton, the most interesting ones are the students themselves--just these Negro and Indian boys and girls, sons and daughters of two despised races; for whom, by the way, all the other interesting things at Hampton have been established, and for whom they are sustained by effort which includes the labor of raising the sum of at least $80,000 every year from private benevolence.

There may or may not be a second Booker Washington on the present Hampton roll, since, as General Armstrong said: "It takes thousands of square miles and thousands of people to produce one first-class man." Yet, granting as many points as you please off that ideal, the fact claimed remains, although to demonstrate it to the tourist might take More time than he is able or willing to spare.

"The response of the simple and lowly ones here for whom we work," wrote General Armstrong to a friend, "is a constant inspiration. "I would exchange places with no man living." "I am waiting for the day when the whole community will come to the true idea of settling its race questions. I believe we have it here and it will some day 0012conquer. Nothing pays like working for ideas."

Measure the interest of that work by the life that General Armstrong gave for it. Measure it by the growing recognition of its importance among thinking people and by the corresponding development and extension of its costly equipment. Measure it again by the readiness with which the life of Hampton's present leader is being as devotedly worn out, in keeping before the American people the truth that, after all, the interest of this work is their interest. Measure it finally by the facts--stated in Dr. Frissell's last report--that of Hampton's thousand graduates, 60 per cent are teaching their people; that of its two hundred trade school graduates, 70 per cent are either teaching their trades or working at them; that almost every one of these and a great number of the five thousand undergraduate ex-students, of both sexes and races, become land owners and cultivators, householders, home-makers, powers for good in their communities, for light to their people, for harmony between the races, for law and order and good citizenship.