Cornelia Bowen
| Cornelia Bowen | |
|---|---|
1902
|
|
| Born |
September 24, 1865 near Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama |
| Died | July 9, 1934 (aged 68) Mount Meigs, Montgomery County, Alabama |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | teacher, educator, school founder and administrator, writer |
| Years active | 1885-1934 |
| Known for | founding Mt. Meigs Colored Institute and Negro Boys' Reformatory |
Cornelia Bowen (1865-1934) was an African American teacher and school founder from Alabama. She was in the first graduating class of the Tuskegee Institute and went on to found the Mount Meigs Colored Institute as well as the Mt. Meigs Negro Boys' Reformatory. Based on the principals of the Tuskegee Institute, where she was trained, Bowen created industrial schools to teach students to thrive from their own industry. She was a member of both the state and national Colored Women's Federated Clubs and served as an officer of both organizations. She also was elected as the first woman president of the Alabama Negro Teacher's Association.
Cornelia Bowen was born September 24, 1865 near Tuskegee, Alabama on the plantation owned by Colonel William B. Bowen, to Sophia (née Carroll) and Henry Clay Bowen (Bowan). Col. Bowen owned the property upon which the Tuskegee Institute would later be constructed. Her mother was a slave, who had been born in Baltimore, Maryland and taught to read by her master's daughter, though she could not write. Bowen was described as a tall, slender, mulatto. The estate was located about one mile to the south of town and the plantation house was burned during the Civil War. The cabin in which Bowen had been born, another cabin, the chicken house and a stable were all that was left of the estate when Booker T. Washington bought the property as the new site of the Tuskegee Normal School in 1881.
As a child, Bowen was tutored by a white woman known to her mother, who taught her to read the McGuffey Readers before she began her formal training in the schools in Tuskegee. The public school for blacks on Zion Hill was closed when Tuskegee Normal School opened and Bowen entered the school after passing the required examination. When she graduated in 1885, in the first graduating class, Bowen received a Peabody medal for her scholastic excellence.
Upon completion of her education, Bowen became the principal at the Children's House, or training facility of Tuskegee Normal School. After several terms, she was advised by Washington of an opportunity to work near Mt. Meigs, Alabama, in Waugh. E. N. Pierce of Plainfield, Connecticut, who had inherited the "Old Carter Place, wanted to found a smaller school on the model of Tuskegee for the community in Mt. Meigs. Bowen traveled to the area and found that it was poverty stricken with dilapidated facilities. The former plantation area was full of illiterate sharecroppers whose cotton was mortgaged before seeds were planted. They had no knowledge of crop rotation or planting for food, owning their own property, and most lived in one-room shacks. The only school was open for three months a year and out of the 300 students who had attended it, only five could read. Bowen first organized a Sunday school to teach them scriptures and then went door-to-door meeting the families in the community to establish a rapport and recruit the mothers into meeting to learn about child rearing.
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