Steele's earliest impression of the school must have been one of amazement at the determination of the poor students to receive an education° He related two worthy examples to the Freedmen's Aid Socie- ty in 188l:

. . . a most energetic student making fair progress in five studies, is a mother with five children and six step-chil- dren, whose husband's wages are five dollars a week, and

who apologized to the preceptress for a poor lesson as on

the day before she washed eighty sheets from a hotel, besides her other duties. Again, a young minister, now here with his wife, walked 180 miles from the mountains to reach the school of his Church, and now sustains himself by walking, amid the pain of a superinduced disease, . . . 25 . . . miles weekly to and from the appointments of his circuit, often receiving as the fruit of a “big collection" sung out of the people's pockets, not over seventy—five cents.7

Steele was no doubt pleased with the successes of the students in their determination to learn, for he also told the Society that on one occasion the illiterate white overseer of a group of young men working on the road near the seminary had to request 3 Bennett student to read a note which he had received.76 A second indication of the

ability of the Bennett students was the publication in April, 1882, of

the second Bennett Seminary Visitor, ”a neat quarterly, published under

the auSpices of the Bennett Literary Society, . . . and edited with

ability by the principal."77

l 1

75Freedmen's Aid Society, Report, l88l, pp. 20-2l, in Henry Morrison Johnson, "The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Education of Southern Negroes,“ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1939), p. 441. The original Freedmen's Aid Society reports for the years l88l through 1887 could not be located.

76Ibid., in Johnson, 22° 213;, p. 442.

77Greensboro Daily Bugle, April ID, 1882.