History
The campus looking south across the harbor of Hampton Roads was founded on the grounds of "Little Scotland", a former plantation in Elizabeth City County not far from Fortress Monroe and the Grand Contraband Camp that gathered nearby. These facilities represented freedom to former slaves, who sought refuge with Union forces in the first year of the war.
The American Missionary Association (AMA) responded in 1861 to the former slaves' need for education by hiring its first mulatto teacher, Mary Smith Peake, who had secretly been teaching slaves and free blacks in the area despite the state's prohibition in law. She first taught for the AMA on September 17, 1861 and was said to gather her pupils under a large oak. After it was the site in 1863 of the first reading in the South of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was called the Emancipation Oak. The tree, a symbol of the university and the city, is part of the National Historic Landmark District at Hampton University.
The Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, later called the Hampton Institute, was founded in 1868 after the war by the biracial leadership of the AMA, who were chiefly Congregation and Presbyterian ministers. It was first led by former Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Among the school's famous alumni is Dr. Booker T. Washington, who became an educator and later founded Tuskeegee Institute, another college supported by the AMA. The President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was read to local freedmen under the same historic tree, which is still located on the campus today. It serves as a symbol for the modern city of Hampton.
Read more about this topic: Hampton University
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)