Berry Pilgrimage

Candles in hand, a thousand students marched along a fine avenue of trees one night last week at the famed Berry Schools in the Blue Ridge foothills of Georgia. They were welcoming visitors--more eminent visitors than they had seen in many a day. From away up North had come one old lady who doubtless would not have made the long trip for any other occasion--Mrs. James Roosevelt, 78, mother of the President of the U. S.-- and from Florida had come Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison. They, with 21 other persons, were at Georgia's Mt. Berry on the tenth annual "Berry Pilgrimage'' gotten up and directed by a younger woman. Manhattan's Mrs. John Henry Hammond. Mrs. Hammond has taken 157 Berry Pilgrims to Georgia, to interest them in giving money and show them "the greatest humanitarian project being carried out in America." In 1901 Martha McChesney Berry, daughter of a socialite Georgia planter, casually began holding Sunday School for mountain children, in a log cabin on her father's estate near Rome. Soon her Sunday School overflowed; she founded another in nearby 'Possum Trot. Next year Miss Berry opened day schools, then a boarding school for boys, at $100 a year of which at least half was to be paid in work. She went north to raise money, got her first $50 in Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman's church in Brooklyn. Andrew Carnegie gave the first endowment money. Theodore Roosevelt and Publisher Adolph Ochs became interested, but endowments never kept pace with the Berry Schools' growth. Miss Berry needs $150,000 in gifts every year. Only entrance requirement for the Berry Schools is that one be too poor to go elsewhere. Bartering learning for tobacco, oxen, eggs was known to Miss Berry long before U. S. colleges took it up during the past two years. Wearing overalls and gingham dresses, all Berry students must work two days a week. Simple, combining hand with mind, are the Berry courses--liberal arts, science, commerce, mechanics, agriculture. There are nearly 10,000 alumni. White-haired and maternal at 66, Miss Berry has been given the $5,000 Pictorial Review Achievement Award, the Roosevelt Memorial Association Medal, the Town Hall Club Medal. Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Edison have long been friends of Miss Berry and benefactors of her schools, but last week's Pilgrimage was their first visit. Said Mrs. Edison: "My wish is that Mr. Edison might have. . . ." Said Mrs. Roosevelt: ''I shall make it my aim that my son. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.