The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.3, page 267, Oct. 1892, U. of Illinois Press

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OCTOBER I 8 9 2 An Item in the Boston Evening Transcript ''Boston] Oct. 8, 189 ONE MILLSTONE OF THE NEGRO S There is perhaps no one thing that is so hindering the progress of the masses of the colored people in the South as the fact that the bulk of them still live in low, dark, miserable, one-roomed huts, writes Mr. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee (Ala.) Normal Institute. Often have young women teachers from Tuskegee, on going into a new community to teach, had to sleep in the same room with a whole family, including old and young men. Often the old cabin is torn down and an attempt is made to build a better one; but in most instances the last is but a slight improvement on the first one, simply because the people as a whole do not know how to build good houses. This statement applies with equal force to schoolhouses and church buildings. My ten years' experience in this part of the South working for my people convinces me that if drawings (pictures) of neat little cottages with two or three rooms with glass windows to let in God's sunlight, accompanied by simple working plans, can be distributed throughout the South, an immense amount of good will be done. What influences the colored people more than anything else is something in the shape of an object lesson. Give them an ideal to work up to, and thousands of them will find a way to build a good house. If friends of the South will put into the hands of this institution $200, $300, or $500, or any part of these amounts, I will have made, copied and sent throughout the South as many drawings as the money will provide. If money can be secured in time, hundreds of these plans can be distributed among those who will attend the Tuskegee Negro Conference in February, and to thousands of others through the graduates of the various institutions of the South who go out to teach. If I can put co,ooo or more of these lithographs into; the hands of co,ooo negroes this winter, a long step in the direction of the solution of this perplexing problem will have been taken. Boston Evening Transcript, Oct. 8, 1892, 9. 267