s cover various phases of handicraft. The Shenandoah
Community Workers of Bird Haven specialize in toy making, while The Jack
Knife Shop of Berea College, the Woodcrafters and Carvers of Gatlinburg,
Tennessee, the Whittlers at the John C. Campbell Folk School in
Brasstown, North Carolina, embrace most every type of handicraft in
their output which is the work of mountain boys and girls.

It was to mountain people that George Washington looked for hope and
help in the hour of our country's need, and two later presidents held
the same opinion. The mother and the wife of a president of these United
States have done likewise.

One winter day more than a score of years ago a group of children
huddled about the pot-bellied stove in a little log church in the
mountains of Georgia. They had trudged through snow and mud and a cold,
biting wind to reach this one-room church house. Though the older folk
were eager to teach the children lessons of Scripture, few of them could
read or write. A mountain child, like every other child, delights in
hearing an older person read, whether it be a make-believe story or a
real story from the Bible. "Wisht you could read the Word," an eager
little girl this winter day said to the old woman who, though she could
neither read nor write, was doing her best to explain from a small
colored leaflet the meaning of the Sunday School lesson.

The story reached the ears of a lady not far away. After that she began
reading Bible stories to the mountain children gathered at a little log
cabin near her home. "Martha Berry didn't need eye specs to see how
eager the children were for learning," one of her mountain friends
remarked, "and then and there she began to ruminate through her mind a
way to help them help themselves. 'Not to be ministered unto, but to
minister,' that was what Martha Berry said from the very first and that
is still the motto of the great institution that has steadily grown up
from the humble beginning in a little one-room log house."

It is an unusual institution of learning with a campus equally unique,
for in its 25,000 acres are a forest, a mountain, and a lake and more
than one hundred buildings which were not only erected by Berry
students, but built from materials also made by them. Here mountain boys
and girls express the fine spirit of independence inherited from their
forbears. Once they enter the Gate of Opportunity, they _earn_ their
education. The mountain boy, with hi