Martha Berry
Martha Berry (born October 7, 1865 in Etowah County , Alabama , † February 27, 1942 in Atlanta ) was an American educator and founder of Berry College .
life and work
Berry was born to Thomas and Frances Margaret Rhea Berry. When she was a baby, her family moved to Rome, Georgia , where she continued her life. Her father ran a plantation and was a partner at Berrys and Company, a food wholesale and cotton broker in Rome. In 1871 he bought a property about two miles north of downtown Rome that later became known as Oak Hill. She lived there with five sisters, two brothers and three Berry cousins whose parents had passed away. Raised at home by a governess Ida McCullough, she attended Edgeworth School, a senior school in Baltimore , for a year in 1882 .
School start-ups
In the late 1890s, she began offering Sunday school lessons to children who had no access to church and school. Encouraged by the results of her endeavors, in 1902 she decided to use the 83 acres inherited from her father to found the Boys Industrial School. A small log cabin that had been built near Oak Hill years earlier as a playhouse for the Berry children and later served as a quiet place for reading, writing, and thinking was the first schoolhouse. When the cabin got too small, they built a small whitewashed school building across the street from Oak Hill. She also used an abandoned church and two other facilities at Mount Alto and Foster's Bend. These four Sunday schools developed into day schools for the children. She had a dormitory built and opened the Boys Industrial School on January 13, 1902, with five boarding students near her home. This school later became known as the Mount Berry School for Boys, and in 1909 it opened the Martha Berry School for Girls. The schools provided school, vocational, agricultural and domestic training for students in a religious setting. By 1912, the state of Georgia had opened eleven Berry-style schools. In 1926 she founded Berry Junior College, which was expanded into a four-year school in 1930. When she soon had more applicants than school places, she was forced to seek more outside support. Berry received $ 50,000 from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and $ 25,000 from Margaret Olivia Sage, widow of American financier Russell Sage . Not only did she use her charm and eloquence to raise money, but she also entertained philanthropists with carefully coordinated visits to the campus. Auto pioneer Henry Ford was so intrigued by what Berry referred to as "a homemade meal, a homemade dinner, and a homemade school" that he became a frequent visitor. In the 1920s, Henry Ford donated a collection of Gothic-style buildings worth four million dollars. The facility bought neighboring farms and forests, and amassed nearly 30,000 acres in its lifetime. Berry College was founded in 1926 and a Model Practice School was later added. The campus became a self-sufficient city with a mill, orchards, herds of goats and cattle, and a bakery.
As part of the Great Depression, donation pledges dried up and money allocations fell, even as the school's self-supporting campus flourished. Berry offered some of the vacant land for camping to accommodate some of the many homeless people who worked in exchange for food and shelter for the school. The school kept hundreds of people alive during the Great Depression, even though its institutional finances continued to shrink. Over the years, Berry's schools gained national attention. President Theodore Roosevelt visited the facility and Berry became the first female director of the university system in Georgia and the first female member of the state planning agency.
She was hospitalized with cancer in October 1941 and died on February 26, 1942, the day Atlanta suffered its first complete blackout in World War II .
Although the penultimate Berry's School, Berry Academy, a preparatory school for young men, closed in 1983, Berry College is one of the world's largest college campuses. Berry College encourages self-help and offers financial support through an extensive work program that gives full-time students the opportunity to work on campus. In addition to the campus buildings built in the Gothic, Georgian, and Early American styles in the early 1900s, Oak Hill, the Ford Buildings, the Roosevelt Hut, as well as the Possum Trot Church and the schoolhouse have survived.
Honors
In 1922, for the 20th anniversary of the schools, the students and the Berry staff built the House o 'Dreams for her as a gift, modeled on the Italian castle Nemi, in which Berry's sister Eugenia Berry Ruspoli lived. She received numerous honorary degrees and was named one of America's 50 Greatest Women in 1925 by journalist Ida Tarbell . That year she was also awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Medal for Distinguished Service. Berry brought five of her youngest alumni with him to the White House awards ceremony, presided over by President Calvin Coolidge . In 1934 she was received at the Court of St. James by England's King George V and Queen Maria von Teck . In 1939 she received a gold medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences . Though never a college student, she received honorary degrees from eight colleges and universities: Bates College in Maine , Berry College, Duke University in North Carolina , Oberlin College in Ohio , Oglethorpe University , University of Georgia , University of North Carolina and University of Wisconsin . During her lifetime, she also received awards from the Georgia General Assembly, the (Theodore) Roosevelt Memorial Association, the Pictorial Review, the Colonial Dames of America, the Variety Clubs of America, the American Institute of Social Sciences, and numerous others. She was appointed to the University System of Georgia’s first Board of Regents, and in 1930 she was selected as one of America’s 12 Most Influential Women by Good Housekeeping magazine. The US Route 27 in Georgia is called Martha Berry Highway, her portrait was hung in the Gallery of Distinguished Georgians in the state capital, she was among the first candidates of the Georgia Women of Achievement was added and was for the Agricultural Hall of Fame of the University of Georgia selected.
literature
- Flemming, Alice. Great Women Teachers. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1965.
- James, Edward T .: Notable American Women 1607-1950. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, ISBN 978-0674627314 .
- Kane, Harnett T., Henry Inez: Miracle in the Mountains. NY: Doubleday, 1956.
- Myers, Elisabeth P .: Angel of Appalachia: Martha Berry. Julian Messner, New York, 1968.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Berry, Martha |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American educator and founder of Berry College |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 7, 1865 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Etowah County , Alabama |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 27, 1942 |
| Place of death | Atlanta |