Another school of this type was founded in the Northwest.  This was the Union Literary Institute of Spartanburg, Indiana.  The institution owes its origin to a group of bold, antislavery men who “in the heat of the abolition excitement"[1] stood firm for the Negro.  They soon had opposition from the proslavery leaders who impeded the progress of the institution.  But thanks to the indefatigable Ebenezer Tucker, its first principal, the “Nigger School” weathered the storm.  The Institute, however, was founded to educate both races.  Its charter required that no distinction should be made on account of race, color, rank, or religion.  Accordingly, although the student body was from the beginning of the school partly white, the board of trustees represented denominations of both races.  Accessible statistics do not show that colored persons ever constituted more than one-third of the students.[2] It was one of the most durable of the manual labor schools, having continued after the Civil War, carrying out to some extent the original designs of its founders.  As the plan to continue it as a private institution proved later to be impracticable the establishment was changed into a public school.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Boone, The History of Education in Indiana, p. 77.]

[Footnote 2:  According to the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education in 1893 the colored students then constituted about one-third of those then registered at this institution.  See p. 1944 of this report.]

[Footnote 3:  Records of the United States Bureau of Education.]

Scarcely less popular was the British and American Manual Labor Institute of the colored settlements in Upper Canada.  This school was projected by Rev. Hiram Wilson and Josiah Henson as early as 1838, but its organization was not undertaken until 1842.  The refugees were then called together to decide upon the expenditure of $1500 collected in England by James C. Fuller, a Quaker.  They decided to establish at Dawn “a manual labor school, where children could be taught those elements of knowledge which are usually the occupations of a grammar school, and where boys could be taught in addition the practice of some mechanic art, and the girls could be instructed in those domestic arts which are the proper occupation and ornament of their sex."[1] A tract of three hundred acres of land was purchased, a few buildings were constructed, and pupils were soon admitted.  The managers endeavored to make the school, “self-supporting by the employment of the students for certain portions of the time on the land."[2] The advantage of schooling of this kind attracted to Dresden and Dawn sufficient refugees to make these prosperous settlements.  Rev. Hiram Wilson, the first principal of the institution, began with fourteen “boarding scholars” when there were no more than fifty colored persons in all the vicinity.  In 1852 when the population of this community had increased to five hundred there