The governor of the State of Georgia went one day to visit the 'Mount Berry' school; and after he had seen the classes, talked with the boys on the farm and in the workshops, and watched the girls weaving, cooking, and sewing clothes, he said that he would enroll his son, when he grew up, in the Berry schools. But the answer to that was: We are sorry, Your Honor the Governor — we accept only those children whose means do not permit them to go to any other school.
Such is the rule laid down by Martha Berry, founder of the schools known by her name, in 1902, after she saw that the boys and girls of the mountain villages were growing up in ignorance and poverty, and were a burden upon themselves and upon society. From that time on she devoted herself, her time, and her money, for forty years, to the service and education of those children, until her appointed hour overtook her. Miss Berry, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, inherited from him at his death the land on which the Berry schools now stand; her inheritance grew with the passing years, until today the Berry schools rise upon a tract of thirty thousand acres of farm and forest land, threaded with silvery lakes, where huge oaks grow and towering pines — and where there still stand, too, the wooden cabins that were the nucleus of this school.
Martha Berry was still a young girl when, as she was playing a hymn in her house, she caught sight of some of the village children in their ragged clothes hovering about the window and listening to her lovely song. She did not hesitate to invite them inside, and she asked them whether they went to school; but
Some of the girl pupils in the laboratory room
In the sewing class: the teacher explains the pattern to some of the students