The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-06-14
THE DOWNING INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL FOR GIRLS SOUTH
 ALABAMAS HOME SCHOOL AND THE WORK TT DOES

The mountain schools of other southern states have won deserved attention and praise, but Alabama has been rather slow in establishing schools of this sort for her people. The Southern Industrial Edu- cationa1 association. founded by a former Alabama woman. Mrs. Martha s. Gielow of Greensboro, has aided these mountain schools materially. In North Carolina. Virginia and elsewhere the association has introduced industrial departments into the mountain schools. The very poor and the many homeless children of the remote country districts are gatnared into these institutions, which are prac- ticaly homes, orphan asylums, and boarding schools all in one. The buildings are the plainest imaginable, for these mountain schools are pitifully poor. There is no attempt at luxury and little chance for what seem necessary conven- fences. In them the children are given food and shelter and are taught the way to sane and sanitary living.
 Somehow Alabama has neglected to go into this field. She has schools and schools and schools and yet there are many of her children who remain un- provided for and untrained. It is an ac- tual fact that there are thousands of white children of school age in Alabama who do not enter school at all. One re- liable authority places the number of these children at 100000. While many do ence in their homes. there are many oth- AL. have little or no opportunity to attend.
 A peculiar case Is that of a family liv- ing about 15 miles from Birmingham. A family of six children have been reared by their aunt since the death of their mother and the refusal of their father to support them. The aunt has been an excellent mother to them but she has never sent them to school, for she nrrnly relieves that the few months Ter brother their father, spent in scnoUl are responsi- ole for his utter worthlessness. In q county adjoining this has been lived @ veritable tragedy of life for a certain family One hot summer day there ap- peared at one of the cottages of a sum mer colony two girls anud boy. The girls were 16 and IS and their brother was younger All three were harefooted ana scantily and poorly dressed. They were as sunburned and workworn as II they had never known anything but the hardest kind of manuel labor They were making a crop, they said, pat; their sup ply of food was exhausted, and they had gone over to the village to sell few po- tatoes The boy had a sack of potatoes on his shoulder and they were trying to sell these so they could buy some meal | They had walked six miles and would walk six miles back to their home. In 4I,A had Dopn and | would never be anything but drudgery; they will never know anything of the beauty of life. School, with all its means o ftraining, development and improve ment had no place in their lives, yet they were intelligent and energetic and fhey could have learned to be capable and in- dependent if they had only had hltie help and encouragement.
 Theirs was not an unparalleled case, for later two women who were neighbors of theirs paid visit to the summer colony. They were probably 20 and 45 years oid and they represented the extreme of pow erty of every sort. One of them was bare footed, and they were so poor and their lives were so barren that they were bit ter and suspicious, and they seemed crushed and depressed beyond recall. All about in those hills there were, and are, just such cases. There are boys and sirls who are becoming men and women With out a chance for anything more than life of toll and struggle for mere exist ence.
 These children are worth helping; they deserve a chance, and they are worthy of far more than they receive from the wealth of those who could and should help them. With all that is given for charity and with all that Is done fer the poor, the fact remains that the children of the states poorer native whites have <.Rf fhn~- ar kind that does not aslt>help, many are too proud to seem dependent, and they are the very ones who need help enough to start them on the way to self-help. few succeed with no help, but they are the very few, and that is too much to ask or expect of a child.
 It remained for a south Alabama man to take definite steps to aid these chill dren This Is MT. J. M. Shofner, a Meth odist minister. In his years of travelling and visiting as a pastor he came to feel that he was needed not as a preacher, but as a teacher; not to tell people how to live that they might know low to die, but to show them how to live that their lives here and hereafter might not be the empty mockery of life that he saw all too often.
 In villages, in the county. here and there he saw girls who so much needed a knowledge of sewing, cooking, house. keeping, dairying and gardening. He saw so many girls who needed and de- served an opportunity to make something useful and beautiful of their lives instead of becoming inefficient and unhappy household drudges. Sometimes it was the daughter of the house, sometimes an or phan girl who lived as an adopted daugh- ter in the home of neighbor or rela- tive, sometimes a girl who served as a domestic.
 Mr. Shofner's realization of the pressing demand for home school where these girls could be taught and trained to fill the place that was theirs was the begin ming of the Downing Industrial School for Girls. It is located near Brewton, Ala, in Escambia county. This is in the ex treme southern part of Alabama. near the Florida line. For years it has been a lumber district acres and acres of pine trees furnishing timber for the saw mills. As the timber has been cut the land has