Berry Award

One year after Appomattox, her parents christened her Martha McChesney Berry. For her they must have envisioned a gracious membership in the Colonial Dames of America, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, also a brilliant Southern marriage. But Miss Berry never married. Nor did she choose the delicately charming life of a Southern aristocrat.

Twenty-six years ago Miss Berry founded a school high in the Georgia mountains. The schoolroom was a log playhouse on Captain Berry's estate. The pupils, ten, were the children of poor families living in the mountains.

Today 1,000 students attend the Berry Schools, now an institution of more than 50 buildings sprawled over a portion of a 10,000-acre estate. But the pupils are no different from the first ten.

No child of the rich may enter the school. But many a half pagan urchin, wont to roam wildly in the Georgia hills, has been received. There are 7,000 names on the alumni list of the Berry Schools.

In 1925 President Coolidge awarded Miss Berry the Roosevelt Memorial Association medal "For Distinguished Service" (TIME, May 25, 1925). Last week. Miss Berry received yet another honor and reward. She won the annual prize of $5,000 given by Pictorial Review magazine to the U. S. woman who has made the greatest contribution to art, letters, science or the social sciences. None doubted that Miss Berry would immediately turn the $5,000 to profit for her school.

Other winners of the Pictorial Review Prize have been: in 1924, Mrs. Edward A. MacDowell, widow of the late Composer MacDowell, for her musicaliterary colony in Peterborough, N. H.; in 1925, Cora Wilson Stewart, for her Moonlight Schools, and her work discouraging illiteracy; in 1926, Sara Graham Mulhall, for her work decreasing the drug traffic; in 1927, Actress Eva Le Gallienne, for her organization of the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City.