298 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan , 



of eight tliousand dollars a year from the State for that purpose, 

 which helps pay the bills. As this is an agricultural meeting, it 

 may perhaps be more proper for me to speak of the institution in 

 its industrial rather than its religious or educational department. 

 The last, both in morals and education, is doing a great work for 

 the'colored people of the South, and so far as the industrial depart- 

 ment is concerned, it meets the approval of every southerner, for 

 they approve of' educating the colored people to work, as they 

 consider that their sphere, whatever else they may think of them. 

 The colored people are all willing to learn and anxious to learn. 

 They have no other desire. They come there for a purpose, and 

 they have no other desire than to learn what will help the mem- 

 bers of their race to rise in the world and occupy the positions that 

 God designed they should occupy as men among men; and as this 

 nation has given them the right of suffrage, the right of free men, 

 they want to so prepare themselves that they shall be worthy of 

 that right by their future actions. 



We have a farm of sixty acres connected with the university, 

 within one mile of the depot, the city extending a mile and a 

 half from the depot in all directions. The city is built up to our 

 land, and is extending around it and beyond it. When I went 

 there, they kept one cow, one horse, and bought most of the feed 

 at that. We have improved the land, — taken up about twelve acres. 

 On some of the land we have raised two or three crops, and 

 during the past eight months we have kept and are now keeping 

 ten cows, four horses, some calves, and plenty of pigs. The crops 

 that we have raised have been mostly garden vegetables for the 

 table, we having some two hundred and forty boarders. We 

 had two crops of potatoes, one in June and the other harvested in 

 October. Sweet potatoes began to be ready for use the first of 

 August and continued until the first of November, being all dug 

 at that time — enough to last until Christmas. Large quantities of 

 all kinds of .early vegetables were raised, and through the gen- 

 erosity of the well-known seedsman, Mr. Gregory of Marblehead, 

 Mass., we received a supply of seeds for our garden, including 

 some sixty varieties, worth probably twenty-five or thirty dollars. 

 We planted those, had every variety labeled with the proper 

 name on a white painted stick, so that all the students could 

 observe the growth of every plant. Twenty varieties of grass 

 were sown on a plot as a specimen plot. The success of that 



