pupils with more sympathy, achieved much
greater success than their predecessors. This school has since been
much developed under the direction of Mr. H. W. Hopewell and Miss M.
Brooks.[14]

The early schools of Shepherdstown, Martinsburg, Harper's Ferry, and
other places nearby in West Virginia were in the beginning largely
private, and even when established as public schools accomplished
little more than their predecessors until they received an impetus
from without. The first stimulus came from Miss Mann, a niece of the
great educator, Horace Mann. She was sent by the Christian Commission
to Bolivar, near Harper's Ferry, to open a Negro school, which in
spite of militant race prejudice she maintained a year.[15] Then came
the establishment of Storer College by that philanthropic worker for
the uplift of the Negro race, Rev. Nathan C. Brackett, a graduate of
Dartmouth College, who had during the last year of the Civil War been
attached to the Christian Mission of Sheridan's army in Virginia.
Fortunately the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau in charge of the
educational work among Negroes designated him as the superintendent of
such schools to be established in the Shenandoah Valley. While he was
thus organizing and directing the education of the Negroes in this
section, Mr. John Storer, of Sanford, Maine, expressed a desire to set
aside a fund of ten thousand dollars for the establishment of an
institution of education for the freedmen on the condition that an
equal amount should be raised by other persons within a specified
period. As there was an increasing interest in the uplift of the
freedmen throughout the country at this time, it was an easy matter to
meet this condition with a similar contribution from another quarter.
The additional funds came largely from the Free Baptists, in the
principles of which this institution had its setting when established.

The work was begun, by special arrangement with the Federal agents, in
dilapidated houses recently abandoned by the Union troops at Harper's
Ferry. With the cooperation of friends the buildings were secured
through the influence of James A. Garfield, then a member of Congress,
and William Fessenden, then United States Senator from Maine. Mr. and
Mrs. Brackett opened this school in October, 1867, with nineteen
earnest students. Since then it has become a power for good, a factor
in the development of actual Christian manhood and womanhood. For a
number of years