The menu for boarding students at the time consisted of "a small
piece of meat, grits and corn bread for breakfast; biscuits and molasses for
lunch; potatoes, corn bread and pork for dinner. On Sabbath they have rice
pudding and in the evening molasses cake for supper in addition to the regular
bill of fare."
The old Patterson plantation house was the first dormitory for girls.
According to the Lincolnite Fifth Biennial Reunion Program(Detroit.
1984), after receiving a portion of her late father's estate "Miss
Phillips added a new front to Patterson home, making it more a modern
dorm." She had already spent some $250 several years before to make the
building more pleasant for the young women who lived there. This is probably
why the wooden structure (the Patterson plantation house) came to be known as
Phillips Hall.
In a report to the American Missionary Association in 1915, Miss Phillips
mentions that the boys at Lincoln constructed "a fine brick building with
very little outside help, have built a model cottage, [and] two
dormitories...." These structures were completed about 1915, and were
Douglas Hall and Hope Cottage. "Nearly all the timbers in the model
cottage were cut out of the pine forests and 'toted' on the backs of the
pupils." Douglas Hall, the dormitory for boys, was built with the
assistance of a local Carpenter, Mr. Charles Davis.
At the time Miss Phillips described the locale of Lincoln School (Perry
County) as "a region full of ignorance, superstition and sin...."
Even then she sought to move away from sexism at Lincoln. She wrote:
Our cooking and sewing departments are doing a great deal
for our pupils. In the advanced classes we have the boys take lessons in these
departments until they can bake biscuit[s], cornbread, cook meat, make a simple
cake, darn stockings and sew on buttons. The girls take work in the shop
learning how to saw, drive nails, and how to make a knife box or some other
simple article for the kitchen. Then with great pride the boys exhibit their
cake and the girls their knife boxes in chapel some mornings.
She stated later that girls were not permitted to finish the High School
Course until they could make the dress in which they were to be graduated and
serve a three course dinner. If memory serves the writer well, the practice of
senior women making graduation dresses continued at least until 1943. Her
report continued:
Some of our pupils walk seven miles to school every morning.
One of our girls who has just finished the Grammar School Course has walked in
the past five years, about 6,000 miles to attend our school, and expects to
walk 5,000 more miles before she is graduated from the High School, making more
than ten thousand miles to get an education. [Italics mine]
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City of Marion, Alabama