whom
he wanted to have attend it. After returning from these experiences
he said: "I saw more clearly than ever the wisdom of the system which
General Armstrong had inaugurated at Hampton. To take the children of
such people as I had been among for a month, and each day give them a
few hours of mere book education, I felt would be almost a waste of
time."

Six weeks after the school was opened, on July 4, 1881, in the shanty
Methodist Church with thirty students, Miss Olivia A. Davidson entered
the school, the enrollment of which had already grown to fifty, as
assistant teacher. She subsequently became Mrs. Washington. The school
then had students, a teacher, and a building such as it was, but it
had no land. It was succeeding in so far as teaching these eager and
knowledge hungry young people what could be learned from books, but
little more. Mr. Washington found that about 85 per cent. of the
Negroes of the Gulf States lived on the land and were dependent upon
agriculture for their livelihood. Hence, he reasoned that it was of
supreme importance to teach them how to live on the land to the best
advantage. In order to teach the students how to live on the land the
school itself must have land. About this time an old plantation near
the town of Tuskegee came upon the market. The school had no money.
Mr. Washington had no money, and the $2,000 a year from the State
Treasury could be used only for the payment of teachers. Accordingly
Mr. Washington personally borrowed the $250, from a personal friend,
necessary to secure title to the land, and moved the school from the
shanty church to the comparative comfort of four aged cabins
formerly used as the dining-room, kitchen, stable, and hen-house of
the plantation.

[Illustration: Tuskegee in the making. Nothing delighted Mr.
Washington more than to see his students doing the actual work of
erecting the Tuskegee Institute buildings. A group of students raising
the roof on one of the buildings.]

And as soon as they were established in their new quarters he
organized the "chopping bee" already described and cleared some of the
land so that it could be used for crops. He did not clear and plant
this land to give his students agricultural training. He did it for
the purpose that all land was originally cleared and planted--to get
food. He, of course, realized that the educational content of this
work was great--greater than any possible textbook exercises in the
classroom.