Montgomery-Macon County AlArchives Biographies.....Bowen, Cornelia 
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Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 September 15, 2008, 8:36 pm

Author: Clement Richardson, Editor

MISS CORNELIA BOWEN

   IN a certain day in May if you are anywhere in Montgomery County, Alabama,
you will see wagons from the country, cars and carriages from the city, crowding
and jamming along the road, all going in one direction. On inquiry you will
learn that they are making their way toward the Mt. Meigs Institute, to attend
the commencement exercises. When you reach the school, there will break on you a
sort of vision of a new city, suddenly peopled. This is the work of Miss
Cornelia Bowen of Mt. Meigs.

   Miss Bowen went to Mt. Meigs in 1888 to plant a school in the wilderness, as
it were. To reach the rural man and woman as well as the small boy and small
girl was a demand which both Miss Bowen and the late Dr. Washington felt it a
sacred duty to answer. To use Miss Bowen's own words in "Tuskegee and Its
People"—"a call reached Dr. Washington in 1888 for a teacher to begin work in
the vicinity of Mt. Meigs, Alabama, similar to the work done at Tuskegee, but of
course on a smaller scale. Mr. E. N. Pierce of Plainville, Connecticutt, had
resolved to do something in the way of providing better school facilities for
the colored people living on a large plantation, into the possession of which he
had come. Mr. Washington answered the call while in Boston, and telegraphed me
that he thought me the proper person to take charge of and carry on the
settlement work Mr. Pierce and his friend had in mind."

   The place itself is far away, out of contact. The people were weighted down
with debt, mild peonage, morals were at a low ebb. Miss Bowen set out to improve
the lives of the old people while building a school for the young. She taught
Bible classes in the leaky country church and held meetings and conferences for
the mothers and fathers. In a little while the people began to know that there
were ideals of health, of family, of property ownership. Thus it is that today
they troop on horse back, in buggy, in wagon to Mt. Meigs Commencement. Here
along with the diversion offered they come upon the first impulse to do good.

   It has become quite common nowadays to speak of the pioneer, but the Mt.
Meigs school was in a very real sense a pioneer in its own kind of work. To set
up in the country a school which was a community center: a school which called
in the country women to teach them cooking, sewing, and house-keeping, to teach
them how to rear and treat their children; to instruct them in finer manners
towards their husbands and towards their neighbors; to persuade them to
eliminate certain habits, like dipping snuff and smoking and chewing tobacco, as
unfeminine and un-womanly; to have done all this in those early days of any kind
of Negro school in Alabama was genuinely pioneer work.

   The same constructive program was adopted with the men and boys. Men were
better farmers, better husbands, fathers, cleaner in their habits, more
ambitious in their ideals because of Mt. Meigs. They formed more definite ideals
of home, of family, of church, from this teaching and from their contact in the
school. Where there was no farm ownership, they began to buy farms. Where there
were no flowers, flowers began to grow: an air of refinement and of taste began
to assert itself.

   There is nothing so new about this now, for we begin to see the very definite
results of this training. Mt. Meigs opened a boarding department and rooms for
the children and taught them new lessons of life. It fired them with zeal to go
back to their village and teach what they themselves had learned. This situation
now so prevalent was at first a most startling innovation when Mt. Meigs began.
It was the first trumpet call to the man in the fields that somebody really
cared for him, for the life he lived, whether or not he was really happy.

   While thus laboring among the elders, Miss Bowen was founding a school. She
bought her land, forty-odd acres, and began to put up buildings. She put on the
curriculum, not only grammar, arithmetic and the like, but the study of
practical industries, such trades as the boys and girls could use immediately in
their homes. Thus she teaches her own school gardening, farming,
poultry-raising, the care of live stock and bee-culture.

   In the meantime she was not forgetting her own education. She had attended
school at Tuskegee Institute, where Dr. Washington was examiner, school teacher,
principal, lecturer and a good many other things. Under him she sat, got her
Tuskegee diploma, then spent some time as principal of the "Children s House",
of Tuskegee Institute. To the education of experience, which her principal and
friend, Dr. Washington, so ardently believed in, Miss Bowen added study in New
York City and further study in Queen Margaret s College, Glasgow, Scotland.

   Miss Bowen is through and through a product of Tuskegee Institute. She was
born on what is now the Institute Campus. The little cottage in which she was
born was the first building of Tuskegee Institute to be used for teaching girls'
industries. "And never do I go to Tuskegee," says Miss Bowen, "that I do not
search it out among the more imposing and pretentious buildings, which have come
during the later years of the school's history."

   The cottage in which she was born stood on the plantation of Colonel William
Bowen, to whom Miss Bowen s mother was a slave. Unlike most slave mothers, Miss
Bowen's mother could read, having been taught by a former mistress in Baltimore.
She was therefore able to superintend her daughter's education to greater degree
than most mothers of the time, hence arises, no doubt, the daughter's very
strong grasp on people and affairs.

   Miss Bowen was first taught by a southern white woman of the town of
Tuskegee.: She then attended the public school of Tuskegee until Booker T.
Washington came and founded the Institute. Her school on "Zion Hill" was then
closed and the children all flocked to the new school. Booker T. Washington was
then an active teacher. He gave her the examination and placed her in the Junior
class. He taught many of the subjects. Miss Bowen looks back with no end of
pleasure to those days when Dr. Washington taught grammar, history and spelling.

   She was a member of the first class to graduate from Tuskegee Institute. This
was in 1885, before the school had even conceived of the great industrial idea.
Miss Bowen was an honor student, receiving a first grade diploma and winning one
of the three Peabody medals; medals which were awarded for excellence in
scholarship.

  With this foundation she went out to establish the Mt. Meigs Institute, full
of confidence. Her work in the school has made a name for Miss Bowen. She has
several times held various offices in the National Association of Colored
Women's Clubs, State Teachers Association of Alabama, and in the Colored Women's
Federation of the State, and its president for fourteen years.

  While a very excellent administrator, and a rare student of both men and
books, Miss Bowen excels in the mind of many, through her gift of eloquent
speech. Few persons on the platform today can bring so much power to bear, go so
directly to the point and so eloquently as can Miss Bowen.


Additional Comments:

Extracted from:

The National Cyclopedia of The Colored Race

Editor-in-Chief

CLEMENT RICHARDSON
President of Lincoln Institute
Jefferson City, Mo.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Dr. C. V. ROMAN,
Nashville, Tenn.
Professor of Meharry Medical College.

W. T. B. WILLIAMS, Hampton Institute, Va.
Field Agent of the Jeannes and Slater Funds.

H. M. MINTON, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa.
Board of Directors Mercy Hospital.

SILAS X. FLOYD, Augusta, Ga.
Principal of City Schools.

DR. R. E. JONES, New Orleans, La.
Editor of South Western Christian Advocate.

DR. A. F. OWENS, Selma, Ala.
Dean of Theological Dept. Selma university.

FRED MOORE, New York City.
Editor New York Age.

ADVISORY BOARD

EMMETT J. SCOTT, Chairman,
Secretary of Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee Institute, Ala.

N. B. YOUNG, Tallahassee, Fla.
President of A. and M. College.

DR. J. W. E. BOWEN, Atlanta, Ga.
Dean of Gammon Theological Seminary.

J. R. E. LEE, Kansas City, Mo.
Principal of Lincoln High School.

J. S. CLARK, Baton Route, La.
President of Southern University.

DR. M. W. DOGAN, Marshall, Texas.
President of Wiley University.

Volume One
NATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
PUBLISHERS
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA
1919

COPYRIGHT 1919
NATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., Inc.
MONTGOMERY, ALA.


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