The bulletin of Atlanta University, 1907 no. 172

              Number 172                                      Atlanta, Georgia                                         April, 1907 The Buildings and Grounds In our November issue we referred to some changes and improvements. Since then we have endeavored still further to improve the condition of our buildings and grounds. The most marked single change has been a,t the barn, where greater convenience and light have been secured by changing the location of the stalls. New grain bins have been built, and to some extent new doors have been put in and new flooring laid. Whitewash has made a marked improvement, from the standpoint of looks as well as health. In the Knowles Industrial Building the installation of the steam heating system has progressed so that we are now able to discard stoves. The exhibition room has been changed to the first floor in order to make more room on the second floor, where we now have two drawing rooms instead of one as formerly. This change in the drawing rooms facilitates greatly the different styles of work that go under the name of drawing. The changes thus far mentioned, as also the completion of the concrete gutter mentioned in our November issue, have been accomplished by our own laboring forces. In part also, we are using student labor in painting the exterior wood work of North Hall. The basement windows of the library and of the practice school have been made more secure by heavy wire screens. A dozen trees have been set out in various places; partly on our main campus east of Stone Hall, partly near the housekeeping cottage, and partly just south west of Stone Hall. Other trees will be set out later, and other campus improvements are in mind, to be mentioned later when they become accomplished facts. Visitors Among our visitors for the month past have been the following: Mr. Wallace H. Keep of Boston, Rev. J. A. Campbell of London, Eng., Rev. Dr. and Mrs. H. C. Haydn of Cleveland, Ohio, Rev. and Mrs. Alexander G. Patterson of Minneapolis, and Miss Clara L. Comstock and Mrs. L. M. Allport of Chicago. Mrs. Allport has long been interested in our work and is spending several weeks with us. A Teacher's Outing AT   TUSKEGEE Twenty years ago the writer asked of President Bumstead the privilege of using a portion of the then unfinished upper story of Stone Hall for a laboratory. The president said, "What is the use? What have you to put in it?" To this I replied, "If we simply start a laboratory, furnishings and material will gradually gather in it." The result is, that to-day, 150 students are spending from two to six hours a week in laboratories fairly well equipped. Something of this thought comes to one as he moves about Tuskegee, whether for the first or as with myself for the fourth time. Given a man of the type represented by the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, and buildings, equipment, friends, and students are bound to gather around him. More than ninety buildings adapted to house, and feed, and train academically and industrially 1,500 students; a faculty of colored teachers, impossible in '61 but possible in '07; this is the visible Tuskegee. The graduates trained to some form of mechanical pursuit and who are with hardly an exception a credit to the institution, the larger body of those who have attended the school and who have left without completing a course, and those who are yet to enter Tuskegee, and who are looking toward from their many homes, constitute the invisible Tuskegee. Said one of the officials to me, "Tuskegee is large enough, we have all the students that we can care for." "I do not know," was my reply, "why an institution that has grown from nothing to 1,500 students in twenty-five years, should not become a school of 10,000 by its fiftieth anniversary. The organizing ability which has compassed the present enrollment may well handle the other. Harvard under one presidency has developed from 600 to 6,000 in its student body.    Why not Tuskegee?" THE FARMERS' CONFERENCE There is nothing new at a Tuskegee Conference. There has been nothing new perhaps since the first conference fifteen years ago. So there is nothing new in the oratorio you heard last Christmas, or in the symphony you heard  last night.    But your   apprecia- tion is whetted by your previous attendance, and you know that the second rendition will mean more than the first. So at the conference interest does not abate because you have attended an earlier session. The woman whose fortune began when she exchanged a dog for a pig, was absent; so was the man who owns a thousand acres of Arkansas bottom. But the man who always appears in a well made suit of homespun, the handiwork of his wife, was present, and if certain interesting characters were not there, there were others to take their places. It was the story of struggle, of small successes grown to larger ones, of ambition to give children educational advantages, and so the building of school houses, the story of land bought, of mortgages redeemed, of diversified crops, of raising one's supplies, and of getting away from indebtedness to the planters for tools, animals and supplies, a more independent class of farmers, a yeomany being developed. One cannot fail to miss certain unique features of former conferences; there are fewer representatives of the old regime; the farmers in attendance dress better, drive better teams, talk better, argue better, than formerly; but there is the same play of wit, the same tendency to scriptural phrase, or outburst of statement in poetic imagery, which perhaps differentiate a Tuskegee Conference from a white conference. But one sits at the conference six hours with an unabated interest, watching now the audience and now the presiding officer as he keeps the interest alive and yet closes down on the man who has finished without knowing it, and allows time to the man with a real message. The center of the conference, as well as the center of the affection of the farmers, is this leader who is so frequently referred to as ''Booker T.," a name of affection which must be very pleasant in his ears. THE WORKERS' CONFERENCE If Mr. Washington had no other title to public esteem, the workers' conference, held the day after the farmers' conference, would give the title. It is a natural outgrowth of the farmers' conference, and gives to those who are Continued on page 4.