L,

and so continued two or three years. The number of scholars was very
large, averaging a hundred and fifty. Mrs. Anne Maria Hall was the
assistant teacher. It relied mainly for support upon subscription,
twelve and a half cents a month only being expected from each pupil,
and this amount was not compulsory. The school was free to all Colored
children, without money or price, and so continued two or three years,
when failing of voluntary pecuniary support (it never wanted
scholars), it became a regular tuition school. The school under Mr.
Prout was called the "Columbian Institute," the name being suggested
by John McLeod, the famous Irish school-master, who was a warm friend
of this institution after visiting and commending the scholars and
teachers, and who named his new building, in 1835, the Columbian
Academy. The days of thick darkness to the Colored people were
approaching. The Nat. Turner insurrection in Southampton County,
Virginia, which occurred in August, 1831, spread terror everywhere in
slave communities. In this district, immediately upon that terrible
occurrence, the Colored children, who had in very large numbers been
received into the Sabbath-schools in the white churches, were all
turned out of those schools. This event, though seeming to be a fiery
affliction, proved a blessing in disguise. It aroused the energies of
the Colored people, taught them self-reliance, and they organized
forthwith Sabbath-schools of their own. It was in the Smothers
school-house that they formed their first Sunday-school, about the
year 1832, and here they continued their very large school for several
years, the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church ultimately springing
from the school organization. It is important to state in this
connection that

THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL,

always an extremely important means of education for Colored people in
the days of slavery, was emphatically so in the gloomy times now upon
them. It was the Sabbath-school that taught the great mass of the free
people of color about all the school knowledge that was allowed them
in those days, and hence the consternation which came upon them when
they found themselves excluded from the schools of the white churches.
Lindsay Muse, who has been the messenger for eighteen Secretaries of
the Navy, successively, during fifty-four years, from 1828 to the
present time, John Brown, Benjamin M. McCoy, Mr. Smallwood, Mrs.
Charlotte Norris, afterward wife of Rev.