Friends, Families & Forays: Scenes from the Life and Times of Henry Ford

5. Martha Berry

5 Martha Berry Known as the “Sunday Lady of Possum Trot,” Martha McChesney Berry (1866–1942) provided an education for hundreds of mountain boys and girls from the area surrounding Rome, Georgia. One of six daughters of wealthy plantation owner Captain Thomas Berry, Martha could have lived a life of ease and grandeur but instead renounced an aristocratic social life to undertake the teaching of illiterate children from the rolling foothills of North Georgia. Berry herself had attended finishing school in Baltimore, but one Sunday after she’d returned to Georgia and was playing the piano in the one-room log school (Possum Trot), three small boys stopped to listen. She was so shocked by their poverty and their extreme ignorance that she decided then and there to start a Sunday Bible school, offering a warm meal as an inducement. This was the beginning of a forty-fiveyear effort to educate rural youth. Berry’s initial objective was to offer poor farm boys a chance to attend school regardless of their means if they were willing to work for their tuition and board. Farm boys could not afford to go to high school; such schools in the state of Georgia before 1900 were few and far between. Berry’s father died in 1901, leaving the plantation house and 500 acres of land as her share, and the Berry School was formally opened in 1902. Everyone, including instructors, helped to work the farmland and take care of the livestock. The crops were to provide the cash income necessary for operating the school. Berry related this incident as representative of that period: One February night I heard a knock at the door. I went myself, and there stood a very small and muddy boy with a pig tied to a rope. “Please, ma’am, I’m Willie Jackson and this is my pig. We’uns has come to school. I done carried the pig here for my tuition. He’s powerful lean now but he’ll pick up tol’able quick.” The six-day weekly school schedule would not be easy.The sixteenhour day, which started at five a.m. and ended at about nine p.m., included an hour for work chores in the morning, four hours of morning classes, an hour for midday chapel, four hours of afternoon classes, 51 and an evening study hour. A thirty-minute breakfast period, a fortyfive -minute lunch, and more leisurely dinner accounted for most of the remaining time. The school shield contains four symbols: the Bible for prayer, the lamp for learning, the plow for labor, and the cabin for simplicity. It was around those symbols that Berry shaped the character of her school. But she could not do all she wanted to do without help. Thus, her lifelong occupation became mainly that of raising funds for the school. For success, her appeals needed to reach high places. Andrew Carnegie is said to have pledged $50,000 in 1909, provided that Berry could raise a matching amount within one month — which she did. President Theodore Roosevelt visited the school in 1911 and made the statement: “This is the greatest practical work for American citizenship that has been done within this decade.” Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, also helped her in fund-raising efforts. 52 Martha Berry Martha Berry on the Berry Schools campus about 1925. (0.7109) The Fords, Henry and Clara, no doubt had heard of Berry Schools, but they did not meet Berry until 1921 at the home of Thomas and Mina Edison in West Orange, New Jersey. On that occasion, Berry invited the Fords to visit her school. By that time, Berry Schools accommodated both boys and girls, in separate facilities. Clara Ford was particularly interested in the girls’ accommodations. On their first visit, in 1922, the Fords were served their noon meal in the rather primitive dining room by the girls. Clara noticed the clean but austere kitchen and remarked that they deserved a better stove. That suggestion grew into plans for a whole new dining hall. That was the beginning. For the next twenty years, the Fords were major benefactors of the Berry Schools. They were quiet about their giving. They were aware that general knowledge of the generosity of the Fords would make it more difficult for Berry to raise money from other sources. In their private railroad car, the Fair...