Berry High School - Torch Yearbook (Mount Berry, GA)

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MISS MARTHA BERRY Founder of the Berry Schools, 1902

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Front entrance to the Frost Memorial Chapel ADMINISTRATION

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THE SUNDAY LADY OF POSSUM TROT Some of the luckiest kids in the country go to school near Rome, Georgia. A short way north of town is a green hedge with wide gates. A road leads through pastures, fields, and forests, and above these are spires. This is all part of the campus of the Berry Schools. Back in 1902, when Miss Martha Berry founded her school, she saw the mountain boys and girls grow up in ignorance and poverty. She saw that the limited life of these people was a burden to them- selves and a loss to the nation. And so for forty years, from girlhood until her death, she gave them her money, her land, her devotion, and her time. Miss Berry, the daughter of a well-to-do planter, inherited the land that is now the site of the Berry Schools. Through the years she added to her inheritance, till today the Berry Schools stand on perhaps the most beautiful campus in America: 30,000 acres of field and forest, the oaks massive, the pines tall, the lakes silver. The original log cabins in which she began are still there, dwarfed now by great Gothic buildings whose spires probe the sky. Martha Berry was just a girl when, playing a melodeon one Sunday afternoon, she saw some ragged mountain children outside the window listening. She invited them in. She asked if they had been to Sunday school. They didn’t know what she was talking about. So she told them Bible stories and played for them and sang. Next Sunday they were back, bringing friends from over the countryside, from Possum Trot and Horse- leg Mountain, from Foster’s Bend and Trapp’s Hollow. None had ever touched a book or knew what a pencil meant. Soon her “class” was so big that Miss Berry moved it to a country church at Possum Trot. To this day the mountain people refer to her as “the Sunday Lady of Possum Trot.’”’ No subsequent honor meant so much to her as this name. Many of the children’s parents could not write or read. Martha Berry decided that a Sunday school was not enough, that book learning must be added to worship. She built a little whitewashed school across the road from the plantation. The first day 12 boys sat on the benches. Others from back in the hills, shy as young deer, hid in the fringe of the clearing, poised to race away. She pretended not to see them and they lost their fear, sidling in on bare feet. But before long it was clear that day schools were not the answer. There was always something to keep the children at home: corn to hoe, hogs to butcher, cotton to pick. Miss Berry decided that the only solution was a boarding school — where the pupils could work for their keep. One day Miss Berry went out into Rome and deeded her property, in perpetuity, to a school for mountain boys and girls. Her lawyer argued but she hushed him. “I shall raise a crop better than the land is producing now,” she said. In January, 1902, with a small dormitory near the whitewashed schoolhouse, she opened the Mount Berry School for Boys, with five pupils. In 1909, the boys swung their axes and laid the logs for a gitl’s school. Down from the hills came their sisters, bringing the pledge of a new life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, the Cumber- lands of Tennessee, the Great Smokies in North Carolina, and the craggy heights of Sand Mountain in Alabama. Today, in the school’s 100 buildings, there is a high school for boys, the Mount Berry School for Boys, and a coed college, the Berry College. Although Miss Martha Berry died in 1942, there still is the same wise balance between poetry and plowing at the Berry Schools. There is laughter on the campus and, come dance nights, the boys and girls skip away. It’s a good life they live and it’s good training they get: to acquire knowledge and skill and the will to work. Excerpts from an article appearing in the July 1954 issue of The Reader's Digest. Copyright 1954 by the Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. Condensed from Town and Country. Reprinted with permission.