In the early days we had very few students who had been used to
handling carpenters' tools, and the bedsteads made by the
students then were very rough and very weak. Not unfrequently
when I went into the students' rooms in the morning I would find
at least two bedsteads lying about on the floor. The problem of
providing mattresses was a difficult one to solve. We finally
mastered this, however, by getting some cheap cloth and sewing
pieces of this together as to make large bags. These bags we
filled with the pine straw--or, as it is sometimes called, pine
needles--which we secured from the forests near by. I am glad to
say that the industry of mattress-making has grown steadily since
then, and has been improved to such an extent that at the present
time it is an important branch of the work which is taught
systematically to a number of our girls, and that the mattresses
that now come out of the mattress-shop at Tuskegee are about as
good as those bought in the average store. For some time after
the opening of the boarding department we had no chairs in the
students' bedrooms or in the dining rooms. Instead of chairs we
used stools which the students constructed by nailing together
three pieces of rough board. As a rule, the furniture in the
students' rooms during the early days of the school consisted of
a bed, some stools, and sometimes a rough table made by the
students.
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