Martha Berry 80 Years after her Passing

The moving of people in the early dawn light towards a stone building emitting the aroma of baking biscuits and hot coffee felt like a scene from a movie of Amish men and women moving in the semi-dark of morning towards a barn raising.  This past Saturday, May 21, 2022, JoElyn and I were joined on the Berry College campus (Rome, GA) by two of our daughters Jane & Evelyn Anne and son-in-law Terrell Gilbert for a meeting of the Berry Breakfast Club.  We were honored guests along with Comer and Sally Yates, back to where Comer and I had served as boarding school masters back in the 1970’s.

The 80 or 90 men and women assembled were alumni of Berry Academy or its predecessor schools started by Martha Berry in the early 1900s. There truly is something special about Berry people.  Ever so many made us feel an intimate part of the group.  Many came to Berry out of hardship situations.  Their stories of a place creating a life-changing experience were more profound than I would hear from any of the other schools where I have served.

Bill Thornton was among the first to greet us; it was he who had arranged for Comer and me to be honored with the Outstanding Faculty/Staff Award.  He had served with us “back in the day” as Dean of Students.  He is now 88 years old, bald, tanned and really fit looking.  He’s an active Pickleball player – a role model to which some of us younger might aspire.

I was 33 years old, JoElyn was 28, and we had been married 3 years when we moved from Columbus, Georgia, to Rome, Georgia, for me to become headmaster of Berry Academy.  When I wrote my memoir Don’t Miss the Miracles, memories of our Berry days came flooding back:

I relished the lore of Martha Berry. She was the most alive historic figure I have ever known. I probably learned more about fund raising from her than from anyone else, before or since. Miracle in the Mountains, the film about her starting the school, thrilled me every time I watched it.

In one scene she was talking to the mountain folks who would come themselves and

bring their children every Sunday afternoon for “Sunday school.” Out of this grew the Berry Schools. But in the film was this exchange between Martha Berry and one of the mountain men who spoke slowly with heavy mountain accent:

First spoke Martha to those sitting in the little Sunday School building

with clapboard sides and a shingled roof. “Now, folks, you know we have a leak in the roof of this little Sunday School building. So, this coming Saturday I want some volunteers to come and help repair the roof.”

Then one of the kindly mountain men spoke up: “Miss Martheee, iffen it don’t

rain, we won’t need to repair the roof. And iffen it do rain, we can’t fix it.” Even

today JoElyn and I will bring up this exchange in the film as relates to some

mangling of logic in something going on around us[1]. 

Here are two more paragraphs from Don’t Miss the Miracles about our Berry experience:

Pregnant JoElyn and I moved into the headmaster’s cottage in late June 1974.

Jane was born August 5th and spent the first six years of her life thinking it natural

to have horses she could go pet at any time, fields and lakes and waterwheels, and

a swan named Marble in the imagination of her bath-time stories from her dad.

“Jane, Jane, come quick. See the deer passing through our front yard!!”

“Daddy, Daddy, I’ve seen deer. I’m busy.” Imagine having grown up in the

center of a deer preserve and, at age four or five, being blasé about seeing deer. To

give her credit as a toddler and beyond, she was a girl of nature, loving every

aspect of this 30,000-acre nature preserve. Who’s to blame her if she thought this

was everybody’s childhood environment[2]?  

We followed breakfast and our goodbyes with a drive around campus with Jane, Terrell, Evelyn Anne, and JoElyn – all being so full of humor.  Seeing the water wheel, the Headmaster’s Cottage where we used to live, the Normandy barns, the horse stables and Possum Trot will leave a lasting impression on all of us.  At Possum Trot we found Martha Berry’s original Sunday School building (circa 1850) and the adjacent classroom (full of the books of a long-gone era) were intact, much as they were when Martha Berry held Sunday School and school here at Possum Trot.  We reluctantly departed, carrying with us warm memories of a rare experience shared.

I have over the past 42 years since leaving Berry had a dim view of our success – not that we didn’t have a close-knit, talented and passionate faculty and staff.  From remarks made at the breakfast, I gained a fresh and perhaps healthier perspective on the impact we made on students and adults alike.  I now see that I was not measuring success “in the Berry way.”

[1] Don’t Miss The Miracles, page 110-111. See chuckjohnstonmemoir.com for link to book.

[2] Ibid., pages 111-112