State

By Alva Stewart The Heritage Of Charlotte Hawkins Brown North Carolina’s newest historic site honors an educational pioneer. Although she died in 1961 and the school she founded and led for half a century has been closed since 1 971 , the leg¬ acy of Charlotte Hawkins Brown lives on. It lives in the more than 1,000 graduates of her school, Palmer Memorial Institute, and now in North Carolina’s newest historic site, the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial State Historic Site in Sedalia. The site, on the former Palmer Memorial campus, is the first in the state to honor a black person and the first to honor a woman. The former school was officially opened to the public as a state historic site in cere¬ monies November 7, 1987. Though founded simply as a school to educate local black students, Palmer grew under Dr. Brown’s lead¬ ership into an elite prep school for blacks and gained a national reputa¬ tion for its work. Eventually, all of the dozen or so buildings on campus will be restored P-oio. By Alvi Stexrt and opened for public viewing as part of the historic site. At present, however, only one building — the Carrie M. Stone Cot¬ tage, the residence hall for single fe¬ male teachers at the school — is fully open. In the cottage, there are two rooms with exhibits depicting the history of the school and the contribution of Dr. Brown to the world of education. A third contains a gift shop with photos, posters, books and other Palmer-re¬ lated memorabilia. Another room is used for showing visitors a 12-minute videotape, “Palmer Memorial Insti¬ tute — The Mission and the Legacy," narrated by Ruth Totton, a former Palmer faculty member. The Sme/Fcbfiury 24 The next building to be restored will be Canary Cottage, the resi¬ dence of Dr. Brown, who for many years owned a pet canary. When one of the birds died, she would buy another, naming each Rudolph. In Dr. Browm’s day, the modest two-story structure, which is painted canary yellow, attracted such distinguished visitors as Eleanor Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Marian Anderson and several wealthy white New England philan¬ thropists eager to help in the educa¬ tion of promising black youth. Several first-floor rooms in Canary Cottage are open now, and the entire building should be open by the end of the year. The first tangible step leading to the establishment of the Brown me¬ morial site came in 1983, when the North Carolina General Assembly A simple marker , above, honors Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who lived in the Canary Cottage, at right, at Palmer.