The Spyglass Tree Read Online Free Page B

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    It had all begun back at the end of the post-Civil War period known as the Reconstruction when it was a makeshift elementary school for freedmen and their families. The first classrooms had been in a cluster of stick-and-dirt cabins in one of the old slavecompounds on the old Strickland plantation, some of which was still owned by contemporary Stricklands who were still among the most powerful people not only in the county but in the central part of the state.
    The founding fathers, three former fugitive slaves also known as the Triumvirate—a fieldhand, a blacksmith, and a handyman—who had escaped to the North to join the Union army eighteen months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and had in exchange for various personal chores during free time in camp between battles been given elementary-lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic by Yankee soldiers, some officers, some enlisted men, some abolitionists, some just plain Billy Yanks willing to make a swap.
    After Appomattox, which ex-slaves almost always referred to as Surrender, the three of them worked their way back from Virginia to Alabama with the express and unwavering purpose (however vaguely defined at the outset) of initiating their own local Reconstruction program even as other ambitious freedmen here and elsewhere sought to achieve, exercise, and safeguard the rights to full citizenship provided for in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, by going directly into politics as such, some as local, state, and even national office-seekers, and some as agitators and organizers.
    They had begun as sharecroppers, with their own mule, plow, two-wheeled ox carts, jerry-built wheelbarrows, credit for seeds, fertilizer, rations, hand tools, and farming implements at the Strickland commissary plus an option to buy their first forty acres on an installment plan, and before very long they had the beginnings of a school that was to become an attraction for students not only from all over the state and region but also from across the nation at large, so much so that as the names on so many of its buildings indicated, it also attracted a considerable amount offinancial assistance from such movers and shakers as Collis P. Huntington, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and numerous others who regarded it as a pioneering effort in post-Civil War education.
    In the early days all students were required to work for room, board, and tuition. There were no entrance fees or incidental charges. Those who could afford to pay were directed to the contributions office where they were given forms requesting their parents to become subscribers to the ongoing campaign for funds. But no student could pay in lieu of work and every student was also required to learn a trade in addition to whatever courses you chose as your primary vocation.
    The first two generations of students were summoned to and from field, shop, and classroom alike by the same old bell that had once regulated life on the plantation before the war, and they planted and processed the food they ate. They produced and marketed such farm products as chickens, eggs, dairy products, and also livestock. They also cut the timber for lumber and they made the bricks and constructed the buildings that were to house them, and in the process they also learned to build and furnish their own houses, provide for their families, and develop or improve their communities wherever they settled.
    Nor was there any end to the tasks early members of the faculty, whose dedication is a story in itself, had to perform. They had to be artisans, husbandmen, and tradesmen as well as classroom instructors. They had to be church workers as well as health and hygiene missionaries. They had to be fund-raisers combing the country for benefactors and able to convince many of the toughest captains of commerce and industry that by making generous donations to the school they were doing far more than underwriting the