of land in Bristol township, Philadelphia County, where they offered boys instruction in farming, shoemaking, and other useful trades.  Their endeavors, so far as training in the mechanic arts was concerned, proved to be a failure.  In 1846, therefore, the management decided to discontinue this literary, agricultural, and manual labor experiment.  The trustees then sold the farm and stock, apprenticed the male students to mechanical occupations, and opened an evening school.  Thinking mainly of classical education thereafter, the trustees of the fund finally established the Institute for Colored Youth of which we have spoken elsewhere.

[Footnote 1:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 379.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., 1871, p. 379.]

Some of the philanthropists who promoted the practical education of the colored people were found in the Negro settlements of the Northwest.  Their first successful attempt in that section was the establishment of the Emlen Institute in Mercer County, Ohio.  The founding of this institution was due manly to the efforts of Augustus Wattles who was instrumental in getting a number of emigrating freedmen to leave Cincinnati and settle in this county about 1835.[1] Wattles traveled in almost every colored neighborhood of the State and laid before them the benefits of permanent homes and the education for their children.  On his first journey he organized, with the assistance of abolitionists, twenty-five schools for colored children.  Interested thereafter in providing a head for this system he purchased for himself ninety acres of land in Mercer County to establish a manual labor institution.  He sustained a school on it at his own expense, till the 11th of November, 1842.  Wattles then visited Philadelphia where he became acquainted with the trustees of the late Samuel Emlen, a Friend of New Jersey.  He had left by his will $20,000 “for the support and education in school learning and mechanic arts and agriculture of boys of African and Indian descent whose parents would give such youths to the Institute."[2] The means of the two philanthropists were united.  The trustees purchased a farm and appointed Wattles as superintendent of the establishment, calling it Emlen Institute.  Located in a section where the Negroes had sufficient interest in education to support a number of elementary schools, this institution once had considerable influence.[3] It was removed to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1858 and then to Warminster in the same county in 1873.

[Footnote 1:  Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 355.]

[Footnote 2:  Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 356.]

[Footnote 3:  Wickersham, History of Education in Pa., p. 254.]