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The Scene: Rome, not unlike its namesake in Italy, was built on seven hills. No interstate highways interrupt its tranquility, and it finds a measure of peace and solitude within the tall country of Appalachia, perched near the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers.
The Sights: The cornerstone of Rome is Berry College, one of the largest academic settings in the world, sprawling across thirty thousand acres. The story of its early years – tempered with sweat and prayers – can be found on campus in the Martha Berry Museum and Art Gallery. It is a poignant tribute to the strength and tenacity of the woman who made it all possible.
The Story: Martha Berry saw the future in a pair of ragged overalls. It was early on a Sunday morning, with a gray haze slowly lifting from the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and she was sitting in a small log cabin on the grounds of her father’s estate, playing an organ. The music of old, hand-me-down hymns was drifting through the thick forest surrounding her when she her ears caught the scattered words of voices outside the cabin’s window. She stopped. She was no longer alone.
Martha Berry glanced over the shoulder of her gingham dress and saw three small boys standing awkwardly in a clearing, their faces shadowed by low hanging branches. Their fists were jammed into the pockets of their overalls.
She smiled.
They looked away.
Martha Berry walked out of the cabin, handed each of them an apple, and said softly, “Have you boys been to Sunday School this morning?”
“No, ma ‘am,” one of them answered. “We were just out running through the woods and heard that pretty noise coming from that queer box. Didn’t know what it was. Came to get a closer look.”
The boys sat around her for hours while Martha Berry told them Bible stories. She could tell that their young minds thirsted for knowledge, but any schooling for them was beyond all hope. At the turn of the twentieth century, education had not yet wormed its way into the remote and fragmented farming communities that lay on the far side of the timbered ridges. There were only five public schools in all of Georgia.
The rich learned. The poor did without, and the boys would forever be trapped by their own ignorance. Maybe a mother would teach them to read. Probably not. She would have to learn to read first.
It was a time when learning to plow new ground and hard ground was far more important to a boy than learning to string together words in a book. It was a time when a plow was easier to find than a book.
Martha Berry would write: “As I rode my pony over the hills and saw the boys and girls without any opportunities – no churches, no schools – I began thinking they must be given some chance in life.” She would give them one. At first, she taught Sunday School at her small log cabin in the wildwoods, then in an old church at Possum Trot, climbing a ladder to write scriptures and the ABCs on faded and weathered walls. In 1901, with a thousand dollars and eighty-three acres of land she had inherited from her father, Miss Berry built a whitewashed schoolhouse, persuading the men and boys who came out of the hills to attend her Sunday school classes to hammer the walls together and thatch a roof. A year later, she added a dormitory and opened a boarding school, an industrial school, for boys. When she opened the doors, five boys were in their seats.
Five years later, Martha Berry included a school for girls, and fourteen of them found their way out of the mountains, looking lost and out of place, quite pleased to be lost and out of place in a schoolhouse that had long been beyond the most secret of their hopes.
Her goal was admirable. However, the conflict she faced sometimes seemed to be insurmountable. She had a little money. No one else in Appalachia did. Soon she would confront the prospect of being broke as well. Her heart was bigger than her bank account.
But Martha Berry remained undaunted. She desperately wanted to help those rural mountain children who could not afford to pay their tuition, and she did not turn anyone away.
For tuition, some brought jars of jam, a quilt, a spare chicken or two, and even a family milk cow.
Others chopped wood, cleaned the classrooms, gathered the eggs, cooked the meals, and scrubbed the wooden floors. Most of her students met their expenses by working in the fields and gardens of her school. They grew what they ate or there was an empty table before them at supper time.
Inez Henry walked onto the campus with a heifer tied to a rope, the family’s last forty cents dangling loose in her pocket, frightened, and unsure of herself.
“I may not be very smart,” she said.
“Do you want to learn?” Martha Berry asked.
“Yes, ma’ am.”
“Then you’ll learn.”
She did, and, in time, she became Martha Berry’s personal assistant.
Inez Henry told me, “Miss Berry said that all we had to do to become successful was follow four basic rules: look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a horse.
“She had common sense, vision, faith, and a deep interest in people. She was born for a certain work in a certain age. I’ve seen her on the mountaintop, and I’ve seen her in the valley. But I never saw her ready to turn back.”
Martha Berry faced crisis after crisis. The culprit was always the same. Money was tight. Money was running out. The milk cows and hand-me-down quilts weren’t enough. Martha Berry lay awake long into the dark night, fearful that she might have to close the doors to her school.
Hope became as scarce as wrinkled dollar bills.
A student came running into her office one morning, carrying a newspaper clipping. “You need to talk to Henry Ford,” he said.
“The auto maker?”
“Yes, ma ‘am.”
“Why should I?”
“It says right here in the newspaper that he’s got a lot of money, and he’s giving it away to people who need it,” the boy said. He paused, then added, “I think we need it, Miss Berry.”
She nodded. That afternoon, she sat down and wrote Henry Ford, telling him about the dreams and hopes and aspirations she had for educating the mountain children of North Georgia. Maybe – just maybe – Mister Ford could provide some financial assistance.
Her letter arrived too late. By now, Henry Ford had become a bitter, cynical, and skeptical man. It often seemed to him that every person and every organization in the country was knocking on his door, looking for a handout, begging for free money. He had grown tired of it. He had grown jaded.
He did, however, send Martha Berry some money.
He sent her a single dime. Thin. Worn. Worth ten cents and nothing more.
Miss Berry could have been disappointed. She could have simply told herself, “Well, I tried, and it didn’t work out.”
Martha Berry was not disappointed at all. She took the dime down to a feed store and bought peanuts. She and her students diligently planted those peanuts, and, at season’s
