The Choctaw Freedmen | Page 9

were awakened by the destitute and helpless condition of
their former slaves. In 1878 he resumed work as a missionary to the
Choctaws making his headquarters at or near Atoka and in 1882 he was
appointed by the Foreign Mission Board, superintendent of mission
work among the Freedmen in Indian Territory. In this capacity he aided
in establishing neighborhood schools wherever teachers could be found.
In order that a number of them might be fitted for teaching, he obtained
permission of their parents to take a number of bright looking and
promising young people to boarding schools, maintained by our
Freedmen's Board in Texas, Mississippi and North Carolina. He thus
became instrumental in preparing the way, and advised the
development of the native Oak Hill School into an industrial and
normal boarding school.
In 1884, owing to failing health, he went to the home of his son, Rev.
John G. Reid (born at Spencer Academy in 1854), at Greeley, Colorado,
and died at 72 at Cambridgeport, near Boston, July 30, 1890.
"He was a friend to truth, of soul sincere, of manners unaffected and of
mind enlarged, he wished the good of all mankind."
UNCLE WALLACE AND AUNT MINERVA
Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva were two of the colored workers that
were employed at Spencer Academy, before the war. They lived
together in a little cabin near it. In the summer evenings they would
often sit at the door of the cabin and sing their favorite plantation songs,

learned in Mississippi in their early youth.
In 1871, when the Jubilee singers first visited Newark, New Jersey,
Rev. Alexander Reid happened to be there and heard them. The work
of the Jubilee singers was new in the North and attracted considerable
and very favorable attention. But when Prof. White, who had charge of
them, announced several concerts to be given in different churches of
the city he added,
"We will have to repeat the Jubilee songs as we have no other."
When Mr. Reid was asked how he liked them he remarked, "Very well,
but I have heard better ones."
When he had committed to writing a half dozen of the plantation songs
he had heard "Wallace and Minerva" sing with so much delight at old
Spencer Academy, he met Mr. White and his company in Brooklyn,
New York, and spent an entire day rehearsing them. These new songs
included,
"Steal away to Jesus." "The Angels are Coming," "I'm a Rolling," and
"Swing Low."
"Steal Away to Jesus" became very popular and was sung before Queen
Victoria.
The Hutchinson family later used several of them in their concerts,
rendering "I'm a Rolling," with a trumpet accompaniment to the words:
"The trumpet sounds in my soul, I haint got long to stay here."
These songs have now been sung around the world.
When one thinks of the two old slaves singing happily together at the
door of their humble cabin, amid the dreary solitudes of Indian
Territory, and the widely extended results that followed, he cannot help
perceiving in these incidents a practical illustration of the way in which
our Heavenly Father uses "things that are weak," for the

accomplishment of his gracious purposes. They also serve to show how
little we know of the future use God will make of the lowly service any
of us may now be rendering.
These two slaves giving expression to their devotional feelings in
simple native songs, unconsciously exerted a happy influence, that was
felt even in distant lands; an influence that served to attract attention
and financial support to an important institution, established for the
education of the Freedmen.
NEW SPENCER ACADEMY
In the fall of 1881 the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions
re-established Spencer Academy in a new location where the postoffice
was called, Nelson, ten miles southwest of Antlers and twenty miles
west of old Spencer, now called Spencerville.
=Rev. Oliver P. Stark=, the first superintendent of this institution, died
there at the age of 61, March 2, 1884. He was a native of Goshen, New
York, and a graduate of the college and Theological Seminary at
Princeton, N. J. In 1851, he was ordained by the Presbytery of Indian
which, as early as 1840, had been organized to include the missions of
the American Board.
As early as 1849, while he was yet a licentiate, he was commissioned
as a missionary to the Choctaws, and, locating at Goodland, remained
in charge of the work in that section until 1866, a period of seventeen
years. During the next thirteen years he served as principal of the
Lamar Female Seminary at Paris, Texas. His next and last work was the
development of the mission school for the Choctaws at Nelson, which
had formed a part of his early and long pastorate.
=Rev. Harvey R. Schermerhorn=,