Cornelia Bowen
Cornelia Bowen (1865-1934) was an African American teacher and school founder from Alabama. She was in the first graduating class of the Tuskegee Institute and went on to found the Mount Meigs Colored Institute as well as the Mt. Meigs Negro Boys' Reformatory. Based on the principles of the Tuskegee Institute, where she was trained, Bowen created industrial schools to teach students to thrive from their own industry. She was a member of both the state and national Colored Women's Federated Clubs and served as an officer of both organizations. She also was elected as the  first woman president of the Alabama Negro Teacher's Association. Early life. Cornelia Bowen was born September 24, 1865 near Tuskegee, Alabama on the plantation owned by Colonel William B. Bowen, to Sophia (née Carroll) and Henry Clay Bowen (Bowan). Col. Bowen owned the property upon which the Tuskegee Institute would later be constructed. Her mother was a slave, who had been born in Baltimore, Maryland and taught to read by her master's daughter, though she could not write. Bowen was described as a tall, slender, mulatto. The estate was located about one mile to the south of town  and the plantation house was burned during the Civil War. The cabin in which Bowen had been born, another cabin, the chicken house and a stable were all that was left of the estate when Booker T. Washington bought the property as the new site of the Tuskegee Normal School in 1881. As a child, Bowen was tutored by a white woman known to her mother, who taught her to read the "McGuffey Readers" before she began her formal training in the schools in Tuskegee. The public school for blacks on Zion Hill was closed when Tuskegee Normal School opened  and Bowen entered the school after passing the required examination. When she graduated in 1885, in the first graduating class, Bowen received a Peabody medal for her scholastic excellence. Career. Upon completion of her education, Bowen became the principal at the Children's House, or training facility of Tuskegee Normal School. After several terms, she was advised by Washington of an opportunity to work near Mt. Meigs, Alabama, in Waugh. E. N. Pierce of Plainfield, Connecticut, who had inherited the "Old Carter Place, wanted to found a smaller school on the model of Tuskegee for the community in Mt. Meigs . Bowen traveled to the area and found that it was poverty stricken with dilapidated facilities. The former plantation area was full of illiterate sharecroppers whose cotton was mortgaged before seeds were planted. They had no knowledge of crop rotation or planting for food, owning their own property, and most lived in one-room shacks. The only school was open for three months a year and out of the 300 students who had attended it, only five could read. Bowen first organized a Sunday school to teach them scriptures and then went door-to-door meeting the families in the community  to establish a rapport and recruit the mothers into meeting to learn about child rearing. Bowen created a community center, where she taught women and girls cooking, housekeeping and sewing, as well as instilling child-raising skills, grooming, exercise and nutrition. She taught the men and boys to be better husbands, farmers and the benefits of ownership of their own land. Her method was to lead by example, renting her own land, she hired a man to plow it. Sowing the seed, for cotton, corn and pumpkin; hoeing and plowing the weeds; and harvesting the crop, she netted a profit  of $30.50 from her $50 sale. Borrowing $1735 from Pierce she built a two-story frame building, which would become a boarding and day school. Within seven years, the community had paid back the debt in full, though sometimes with livestock, which Bowen would sell in Montgomery to add the money to the debt repayment fund. Besides teaching grammar and arithmetic, Bowen taught life-skills like farming, gardening, and raising bees, livestock and poultry. As she had nearly three hundred students and only five who could read, Bowen had the five readers assist her in teaching the  others with the assistance of a preacher's son, who helped without pay. Within three years, she was able to hire an assistant. Each summer, Bowen would travel north to raise funds for her school and in the process, further her own education. In 1893, she attended the Columbia Teachers' College in New York City and later between 1898 and 1900 attended Queen Margaret College in Glasgow. She attained a bachelor's degree from Straight College in New Orleans and later, earned a master's degree from Battle Creek College with a thesis entitled "Juvenile Crime among Negroes in Alabama . In addition, she would recuperate for part of each summer at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and occasionally was accompanied by her sister Katie, who also taught at Mt. Meigs. A devotee to muscular Christianity", Bowen believed that good health was achieved by proper nourishment and exercise and that participation in athletics also taught a respect for cooperation, rules, self-discipline, as well as the benefits of work. She participated in the "back to nature" movement, of intellectuals who ate a predominantly vegetarian diet, exercised and at least once spent time in a naturist community. In 1896 when the Afro-American  Women's League was formed in Boston, Bowen was one of the founding members. By 1904, she was the corresponding secretary of the organization and that same year was elected president of the Alabama State Colored Women's Federated Clubs. She continued to serve as state president for more than a decade. In 1897, she elected as vice president of the Alabama Negro Teacher's Association and would hold the post until at least 1910. Bowen attended many conferences throughout the United States speaking to women's groups and in 1905 published a short autobiography called "A Woman's Work