nstitution was due manly to the efforts of Augustus
Wattles who was instrumental in getting a number of emigrating
freedmen to leave Cincinnati and settle in this county about 1835.[1]
Wattles traveled in almost every colored neighborhood of the State and
laid before them the benefits of permanent homes and the education for
their children. On his first journey he organized, with the assistance
of abolitionists, twenty-five schools for colored children. Interested
thereafter in providing a head for this system he purchased for
himself ninety acres of land in Mercer County to establish a manual
labor institution. He sustained a school on it at his own expense,
till the 11th of November, 1842. Wattles then visited Philadelphia
where he became acquainted with the trustees of the late Samuel Emlen,
a Friend of New Jersey. He had left by his will $20,000 "for the
support and education in school learning and mechanic arts and
agriculture of boys of African and Indian descent whose parents
would give such youths to the Institute."[2] The means of the two
philanthropists were united. The trustees purchased a farm and
appointed Wattles as superintendent of the establishment, calling it
Emlen Institute. Located in a section where the Negroes had sufficient
interest in education to support a number of elementary schools, this
institution once had considerable influence.[3] It was removed to
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1858 and then to Warminster in the same
county in 1873.

[Footnote 1: Howe, _Ohio Historical Collections_, p. 355.]

[Footnote 2: Howe, _Ohio Historical Collections_, p. 356.]

[Footnote 3: Wickersham, _History of Education in Pa._, p. 254.]

Another school of this type was founded in the Northwest. This was the
Union Literary Institute of Spartanburg, Indiana. The institution owes
its origin to a group of bold, antislavery men who "in the heat of
the abolition excitement"[1] stood firm for the Negro. They soon had
opposition from the proslavery leaders who impeded the progress of
the institution. But thanks to the indefatigable Ebenezer Tucker,
its first principal, the "Nigger School" weathered the storm. The
Institute, however, was founded to educate both races. Its charter
required that no distinction should be made on account of race, color,
rank, or religion. Accordingly, although the student body was from
the beginning of the school partly white, the board of trustees
represented denominations of both ra