noxville, Tennessee. Some of these do a different grade of work, but
one much needed.

At Tuskegee, Alabama, starting fifteen years ago in a little shanty with
one teacher and thirty students, with no property, there has grown up an
industrial and educational village where the ideas that I have referred
to are put into the heads, hearts, and hands of an army of colored men
and women, with the purpose of having them become centers of light
and civilization in every part of the South. One visiting the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute to-day will find eight hundred and fifty
students gathered from twenty-four States, with eighty-eight teachers
and officers training these students in literary, religious, and
industrial work.

Counting the students and the families of the instructors, the visitor
will find a black village of about twelve hundred people. Instead of the
old, worn-out plantation that was there fifteen years ago, there is a
modern farm of seven hundred acres cultivated by student labor. There
are Jersey and Holstein cows and Berkshire pigs, and the butter used is
made by the most modern process.

Aside from the dozens of neat, comfortable cottages owned by individual
teachers and other persons, who have settled in this village for the
purpose of educating their children, he will find thirty-six buildings
of various kinds and sizes, owned and built by the school, property
valued at three hundred thousand dollars. Perhaps the most interesting
thing in connection with these buildings is that, with the exception of
three, they have been built by student labor. The friends of the school
have furnished money to pay the teachers and for material.

When a building is to be erected, the teacher in charge of the
mechanical and architectural drawing department gives to the class in
drawing a general description of the building desired, and then there is
a competition to see whose plan will be accepted. These same students in
most cases help do the practical work of putting up the building--some
at the sawmill, the brick-yard, or in the carpentry, brickmaking,
plastering, painting, and tinsmithing departments. At the same time care
is taken to see not only that the building goes up properly, but that
the students, who are under intelligent instructors in their special
branch, are taught at the same time the principles as well as the
practical part of the trade.

The school has the building in the end, and the s