The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.7, page 249, Aug. 1903, U. of Illinois Press

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AUGUST 1 9 0 3 their scant clothing—from such an abode to a clean, decent, wellventilatecI house is a long step, but this is only a part of what Mrs. Washington is trying to accomplish, and in some cases has already achieved. In childhood, Booker Washington's wife says, she ran away from a home little better than the worst of those she is now trying to reform. To some strict but kindly Quakers who took her to live with them and subsequently sent her to a university she owes her own careful training. Perhaps the best idea one can get of Mrs. Washington's methods was summed up in the words of a friend who said of her: ''Mrs. Washington works on the principle that cleanliness is not only next to godliness, but before it.'' In speaking of the way she started her ''missionary work,'' as she calls it, Mrs. Washington said that six or seven years ago she became impressed with the conditions on a plantation about eight miles from Tuskegee, where a settlement of twenty negro families live in some old slave ''quarters.'' When she first went to them five to ten persons were living in one room houses, and the children were allowed to go round with little or no clothing on them. ''It was just like Africa,'' she said, speaking of that time. ''I felt something must be done, so one day I went down there with a good stiff broom, determined to see what I could do. I went to the most promising house of the lot and proposed to hold a meeting, first suggesting that we sweep up the place in honor of the occasion. The sweeping I gave that room made the woman who lived in it so ashamed of her own slack work that I have never since found her home in the same condition.'' After her first visit Mrs. Washington went periodically to the different cabins on the estate, showing the women how to remove ''improve] even the most unpromising surroundings and urging them to take an interest in the decency of their homes for their own sakes and the sakes of their husbands and children. In the course of time the planter for whom most of these people work gave the use of an abandoned cabin for a ''settlement house,'' where a young woman graduate of Tuskegee was sent to carry on the work that had already been started. Since that time Mrs. Washington has raised sufficient funds to provide in its place a serviceable frame dwelling house on ten acres of adjoining land. This house is 249