ent holds meetings with the
girls on questions of health, morals, and manners. The building is
heated with steam and lighted by electricity. All in all, Douglass Hall
is the best of the buildings so far built by the Institute, and is a
fitting monument to the man whose name it bears.

The Slater-Armstrong Memorial Agricultural Building was completed and
dedicated in 1897. Hon. James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture of the
United States, honored the school by his presence and an address on the
occasion of the formal opening of this building. It is a brick structure
of two-and-a-half stories, with recitation-rooms, laboratory, museums,
library, and an office for the use of the Department of Agriculture. In
addition to its appropriation of $3,000 for the general work of the
school, the State of Alabama makes an annual appropriation of $1,500 for
the maintenance of an Agricultural Experiment Station. The plots of the
Station and the school-farm are in close proximity to the Agricultural
Building, and on these the young men taking the course in Agriculture
put in practise the theories which they learn in the class-room. Many
important experiments have been undertaken by the Station, of
particular interest being those relating to soil building, the
hybridization of sea-island cotton with some of the common short-staple
varieties, fertilizer tests with potatoes, by which it has been shown
that it is possible to raise as much as 266 bushels per acre on light,
sandy soil such as that comprising the school-lands, while the average
yield in the same part of Alabama is not more than 40 bushels to the
acre.

The next building of importance to be put up after the Agricultural
Building was the Chapel. Another gift from the two New York ladies who
gave the money for Phelps Hall made possible this magnificent structure,
admittedly one of the most imposing church edifices in the South. It is
built of brick, 1,200,000 bricks entering into its construction, all of
which were laid by student masons. It has stone trimmings, and in shape
is a cross, the nave with choir having a length of 154 feet, and the
distance through the transept being 106 feet. There are anterooms and a
study for the Chaplain of the Institute. Including the gallery the
seating capacity is 2,400. Here all gatherings of the school for
religious and other purposes are now held. The great Tuskegee Negro
Conference that assembles in February of each year holds its meetings