The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 6, 1860, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers at Hale's Ford, Franklin County, Va. BTW remembered in Up from Slavery that his older brother had shared with him a rag pallet on the dirt floor and that John had volunteered to wear his stiff new flaxen shirt until it was broken in enough for the younger brother to wear. When BTW went to Hampton, John continued to work in the Malden salt mines, helping to support the family and occasionally sending money to BTW. Soon after BTW returned to Malden to teach, he convinced 'John to attend Hampton and aided him financially while he was there. John graduated in 1879 and returned to replace BTW in the school at Malden, but soon began working for the federal government in Charleston on a series of locks and dams on the Kanawha River. In 1885 he came to Tuskegee as business agent, farm manager, and superintendent of industries and in the following years performed a variety of tasks for the school. In these early years [ohn Washington's practical common sense and his jack-of-all-trades ability made him vital to the physical development of the school. He had BTW's practical gifts but lacked the same ability to work with others. He planned and supervised the building of all the early structures on the Tuskegee campus, devising ingenious schemes to cut costs and to use the willing but unskilled student labor force. To solve Tuskegee's water shortage in ~ 89 I, ''Mr. J. H.,'' as he liked to be called, explored and found a large spring threequarters of a mile from the school, bought pipe, and laid it himself to save the installation cost. When in the late 1880s it looked as if a gift of a cupola for the new Tuskegee foundry from Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn would be lost because Tuskegee did not have the money to pay for its shipment, ''Mr. J. H.'' impulsively hitched a team of oxen to a heavy cart used for hauling wood and made the thirty-mile trip to Auburn for the machinery. Besides establishing the trades and industries training and being responsible for the overall care and upkeep of the institution, he was the first drillmaster and commandant of cadets, started the band and the baseball team, began the record-keeping system of the institute, and introduced bee culture, poultry raising, and fruit canning. Inevitably, as the school grew larger, men more expert than John Washington came to replace him in one after another of these early positions. For instance, Robert R. Taylor, an architect trained at M.I.T., replaced him in 18 as head of the building program and director of the mechanical industries, and George Washington Carver relieved him of his farm-manager duties in ~ 896. According to one of Carver's biographers, Rackham Holt, John H. Washington protested his brother's decision to hire Carver. ''We don't need what they call a scientific agriculturist. We need a dairyman,'' he told BTW shortly after Carver's arrival. (Holt, George Washington Carder, ~ 54. ~ After ~ 902 John H. Washington was superintendent of industries and, whenever both BTW and Warren Logan were absent, acting principal. John H. Washington played a smaller role in the affairs of the institute after his brother's death. He retired in 19~9 and died five years later. 7 Booker, later named Booker Taliaferro Washington (~856-~9~53. BTW's medium-brown skin, reddish hair, and gray eyes suggest that he was the son of a white man. He apparently never knew and was never particularly interested in the identity of his father, knowing only that the man was from the neighborhood. It is conceivable that the father was any one of the five older sons of James Burroughs or Burroughs himself; either Josiah Ferguson, who owned the farm across the road from the Burroughs, or his son Thomas Benjamin Ferguson; or Benjamin N. Hatcher, part owner of a tobacco factory and blacksmith shop in 6