File:Alford Pierrepont to Alice Mary Longfellow, 8 February 1901 (670b3f67-c3ad-4f4d-baf6-296494ea0f29).jpg

Manuscript letter

Archives Number: 1007.001/002.003-001#091

[printed letterhead: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute.]
Hampton, Va., Febuary [sic] 8 1901
Miss Longfellow,
Cambridge, Mass.
Dear friend,--
I am very thankful to you for paying my scholarship fee to this school. I am also thankful for the "Fun with Electricity" you sent me Christmas. [sic] It has interested me very much and I think I shall study more about the wonderful power. I am fifteen years old and am the son of Thomas Wildcat Alford whose scholarship you paid in 1879-1883. I will now tell you something of my father's [p. 2] doings after he left Hampton. He married soon after he left Hampton and built a house of lumber. He then taught school at the government school near my home and was disciplinarian at Chilocco for three mounths [sic]. While he was teaching he studied surveying at the same time. When the government called for surveyors, father applied and was appointed surveyor by the governor of Oklahoma. He spent most of his time surveying for the next three years. He surveyed the Absentee Shawnee, Kickapoo and a part of the Sac & Fox and Pottawatomi reservations in the Oklahoma Territory. After he finished the Indian reservations he was county surveyor.
[p. 3] He then went to farming until our home was broken up by the death of our dear mother. I was now seven years old and had two brothers we went to a missionary school for a while. I almost forgot to say that when he first left Hampton, the Indians did not have any thing to do with him. They said that he was not loyal to the tribe because he had adopted white man way of liveing and had married a white woman. Things seemed very dark to father for a while but one day an Indian got into [p. 4] trouble and father helped him. All the Indians then thought him "Heap good" and sent their children to school.
I went to school at a "Friends” school until about three years ago. Then I went to the Absentee Shawnee Government school where my father taught a few years ago. I went to this school three years and graduated last June 20.
I always heard my father talking about Hampton. Last summer Mr. Rodgers of Hampton came to Oklahoma and asked us to come to Hampton and so five of the class of six that graduated came to Hampton.
[p. 5] At first I got a little home sick and do sometimes yet I think. I can almost shut my eyes and see my home. The frame house with the log addition and a fatherly walnut spreading its long branches over a part of the roof. The row of large mulberry trees and a grow of native oak in the yard. I can also see my two brothers younger than my self carrying wood or doing the chores or playing ball with some of the neighbor’s boys. And far in the back-ground [p. 6] I can see an irregular line of bare trees that marks the course of a creek that runs through our farm. Again thanking you for your kindness I remain.
Respectfully yours
Pierrepont Alford.

• Keywords: long archives; document; alice m. longfellow papers (long 16173); correspondence; education; hampton institute; Manuscripts (1007.001); (LONG-Subcollection); Correspondence (1007.001/002); (LONG-SeriesName); Scholarship Student Correspondence (1007.001/002.003); (LONG-SubseriesName); Letters to Alice Longfellow (1007.001/002.003-001); (LONG-FileUnitName)