here Hampton was. By walking, begging rides, and paying for a
portion of the journey on the steam-cars, I finally succeeded in
reaching the city of Richmond; Virginia. I was without money or
friends. I slept on a sidewalk; and by working on a vessel the next
day I earned money enough to continue my way to the institute, where I
arrived with a capital of fifty cents. At Hampton I found the
opportunity--in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries
provided by the generous--to get training in the classroom and by
practical touch with industrial life,--to learn thrift, economy, and
push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian
influence, and spirit of self-help, that seemed to have awakened every
faculty in me, and caused me for the first time to realise what it
meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.

While there, I resolved, when I had finished the course of training, I
would go into the Far South, into the Black Belt of the South, and
give my life to providing the same kind of opportunity for
self-reliance, self-awakening, that I had found provided for me at
Hampton.

My work began at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, in a small shanty church,
with one teacher and thirty students, without a dollar's worth of
property. The spirit of work and of industrial thrift, with aid from
the State and generosity from the North, have enabled us to develop an
institution which now has about one thousand students, gathered from
twenty-three States, and eighty-eight instructors. Counting students,
instructors, and their families, we have a resident population upon
the school grounds of about twelve hundred persons.

The institution owns two thousand three hundred acres of land, seven
hundred of which are cultivated by student labor. There are six
hundred head of live-stock, including horses, mules, cows, hogs, and
sheep. There are over forty vehicles that have been made, and are now
used, by the school. Training is given in twenty-six industries. There
is work in wood, in iron, in leather, in tin; and all forms of
domestic economy are engaged in. Students are taught mechanical and
architectural drawing, receive training as agriculturists, dairymen,
masons, carpenters, contractors, builders, as machinists,
electricians, printers, dressmakers, and milliners, and in other
directions.

The value of the property is $300,000. There are forty-two buildings,
counting large and small, all of which, with the excepti