CHAPTER II

BENNETT SEMINARY

Background, Bennett Seminary began in a unique post—Civil War community on the southwestern edge of Greensboro, North Carolina. On December 5, I865, Yardley Warner, a Quaker from Germantown, Pennsylva— nia, purchased thirtymfour acres of land near South Buffalo Creek, Guilford County° An adjacent one and oneahalf acres was purchased May 28, l866. These thirty—five and one-half acres, transferred to the Philadelphia Association of Friends, were subdivided into acre lots and sold to newly freed Negroes of the area at low costs, payable over long terms. In honor of its founder, the large area became known as Warners- ville.I

A representative of the Methodist Episcopal Church, it is said, entered the Warnersville community, offering in behalf of his church a school for the freedmen and membership in his church (the Quakers not having alloWed the freedmen to join their church).2 The Warnersville

Methodist Episcopal Church, later known as St° Matthew's Methodist

1 . Nell Craig, *Warnersville," Greensboro Daily News, June 1,

l94l, reprinted in Stafford Allen Yardley, Yardley Warner: The Freed-

men's Friend: His Life and Times (Didcot, England: The Wessex Press,

1957) pp. 585-297. .

2Mr. B. W. Harris, interview,lh February 1969. Mr. Harris, who is Chairman of Adult Education and Community Services at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, discovered this information while doing related research on Negro Methodist his - tory in Greensboro.