Governor Charles B. Aycock strongly supported educational improvement for both white and black citizens, and his successor Governor Robert B. Glenn helped add humanitarian measures during his term. The Christian and philanthropic King’s Daughters and other service organizations helped create the Stonewall Jackson school in Concord, an institution which would be considered “green” today.
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Stonewall Jackson School of Reclaiming Human Character
The Stonewall Jackson Manual Training and Industrial School at Concord had its first legislative provision and appropriation during the session of the General Assembly of 1907. The significance of the act in relationship to the broadening humanitarian program of the State has been noted elsewhere . . .
The King’s Daughters, women’s clubs, other organizations and Honorable James P. Cook of Concord were largely responsible for stimulating the Legislature to make an initial appropriation of ten thousand dollars to provide a place for training the “socially unadjusted boys of the State.”
Every State in the Union has made similar provision in one way or another, and such a school is no longer considered as a “correctional institution,” but a specialized school actually integrated with the educational system of the State. In the thirty odd years since the opening of the Jackson Training School more than five thousand boys have had the opportunities of the training here, and statistics have indicated that about four-fifths of them have gone well-qualified in skill, in attitude and in other qualifications for useful places in citizenship.
The original site for the school was donated by citizens of Concord and Cabarrus County. The first cottage home was built and furnished largely with the aid of the King’s Daughters and other women’s clubs of the State. The doors of the school were opened January 12, 1909. Since the Jackson Training School has become a little city unto itself . . . and the school has grown in physical plant and enlarged its humanitarian service in the reclamation of human character.
[In 1940] the physical plant embraced seventeen cottages, the Cannon Memorial Building, the trades building, a shop, a barn, the gymnasium, swimming pool, a library of five thousand volumes, infirmary, ice-plant, dairy, laundry, bakery and textile unit.
One interesting feature is a complete cotton mill unit. Cotton raised in the field by the labor of the boys, is woven into cloth by the boys, which material is composed largely of shirting. Then the boys in the sewing room make this material into shirts for school use. When these shirts are worn out the rags are used for cleaning purposes, and eventually returned to the soil, thus completing the cycle of the combination of nature’s and man’s processes.
A weekly journal, “The Uplift,” is published by the printing class of the school. The printing shop, shoe and harness repair shop, sheet metal shop, barber shop, the dairy and the farm, present a remarkable scope of opportunities of training for every boy in the school.
The State has provided increasing appropriations, but the institution has received benefactions from many sources. Nine of the cottages represent donations by as many individual counties, women’s clubs and other organizations, and a number of gifts from wealthy industrialists of the State, have contributed to the expansion of the physical plant. Among these benefactors are members of the Cannon family, the Reynolds, Cones, Swinks, Duke, Barnhardt, and other well-known names and families of North Carolina.”
(North Carolina, the Old North State and the New, Archibald Henderson, editor, Lewis Publishing Company, 1941, pp. 505-506)
