Founded as the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Hampton Institute is located near Hampton, Virginia. The American Missionary Association of New York bought the land in 1867 specifically to provide instruction for freedmen. The school opened in April 1868 and received a formal charter from the General Assembly of Virginia in 1870. The founder and first principal was General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, assigned by the Freedmen's Bureau and himself the son of missionary educators in the Hawaiian Islands.
Indian students first attended Hampton in 1878 when a group of Kiowa men who had been held as prisoners of war at St. Petersburg, Florida, were brought north as an experiment in Indian education. The first group's success led Congress to authorize its leader, Army captain Richard Henry Pratt, use of an abandoned army barracks at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for an all-Indian institution. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879.
Some officials objected to the mixing of African American and Native American students, yet Hampton was much like other federal boarding schools for Indians. Generally, students learned domestic and agricultural arts and crafts and were then encouraged to return to their people as emissaries of Euro-American culture. Male students also received military training.
By the turn of the century nearly a thousand students were attending Hampton, of whom 135 were Native American. From that high point, the number of Indian pupils dwindled until 1923, when the program was discontinued.
See also
Boarding Schools;
Education.
