The American Missionary | Page 6

in the other
churches. The pastors of two of the Baptist churches are graduates of
our school here, and the pastor of one of the Methodist churches is now
taking lessons in our seminary.

The present membership of the church is 219. Many of them are poor
students who have to be helped through school. The resident members
have but very little money. With one or two exceptions they receive
small pay for what they do. Those who have trades find but little here
to do and have to go away to get employment. Among the male
members of the church are farmers, mechanics, etc., and among the
females those who do laundry work, sewing, etc. Several of these
women take the washing of families home and work very hard for a
very little money with which to subsist their families, buy books, and
pay tuition for their children in Talladega College.
There are about thirty-five members of the church who own their
homes, and about eleven who rent the places where they live. Several
of the homes owned by the members of the church are fairly
comfortable for Southern homes, having from two to seven rooms.
None of them are costly. I do not suppose that one of them cost $1,000.
Neither is the furniture in them costly. Scarcely any of them have
carpets on their floors. They look upon carpets as a luxury which they
cannot afford. Plaster on the walls is almost as rare as carpets on the
floors. In some cases there is not a rocking-chair in the house. The
furniture they have is of a very ordinary kind.
The people have but very little money and are obliged to struggle long
and hard to get a little place to call home, in many cases buying the
lumber and hiring the carpenter on credit. This being the case, it takes
them years and years to pay for the little homes. The homes vary from
the fairly comfortable to the wretched. It is noticeable that those who
have had the advantages of an education have better homes than those
who have no education.
There comes to mind as I write one very miserable home in which both
the parents are ignorant. There are three rooms to the house not nearly
so comfortable as the places where Northern farmers keep their horses
and cattle. There is neither stove nor grate in the house, but simply
some rocks on each side of the open fireplace on which they lay the
green wood, by which they sit and shiver while the cold winds blow
through the cracks in the floor and sides of the house. There are six

children and only two excuses for beds. One of these has on it a tick,
the other has a pile of dirty rags. There is not a whole table or chair in
the house.
And yet, these people, like many others just as poor as they, are trying
to educate their children. They believe that in Christian education lies
the only redemption from this condition for them and their race,
through their children, who are enjoying privileges that were denied to
them.
There are not more than a dozen individuals in the church who are
earning a comfortable living. More than that number did so when times
were better, but now there is not much for them to do except conduct
very poor farms, on which they cannot earn enough to make themselves
comfortable.
There have been very few years in the history of the church when it did
not have a revival of religion. Of late it has been the custom to have
two series of special services each year--one during the winter, while
the school is in session, and another during the summer vacation. Effort
is made each year to have all the students converted. Of all the young
people who have graduated here only two have left without being
professing Christians.
The growth of the church has not been rapid, but steady. During the
days of slavery the colored people were members of the churches to
which their masters belonged. None of them belonged to
Congregational churches, and so, when Congregationalism came to the
South after the war, it was entirely new to the former slaves and to
those who had been their masters.
The masses of the children and the young people still cling to the
churches which their parents were taught to love. It will, therefore, be
some time before Congregationalism will grow rapidly in the South.
The church has no building of its own, and no parsonage, but worships
in the chapel of Talladega College. The building in which the chapel is
located was erected by the white Baptists of the Coosa Valley
Association before the war as