the immigrants of 1847, with no promise of proper care or training. She spoke of the matter to Harvey Clark who asked her what she would do. "If I had the means I would establish myself in a comfortable home, receive all poor children, and be a mother to them," said Mrs Brown. "Are you in earnest?" asked Clark. "Yes." "Then I will try with you, and see what can be done."
There was a log meeting-house on Clark's land, and in this building Mrs Brown was placed, and the work of charity began, the settlers contributing such articles of furnishing as they could spare. The plan was to receive any children to be taught; those whose parents could afford it, to pay at the rate of five dollars a week for board, care, and tuition, and those who had nothing, to come free. In 1848 there were about forty children in the school, of whom the greater part were boarders;[1] Mrs Clark teaching and Mrs Brown having charge of the family, which was healthy and happy, and devoted to its guardian. In a short time Rev. Gushing Eells was employed as teacher.
There came to Oregon about this time Rev. George H. Atkinson, under the auspices of the Home Missionary Society of Boston.[2] He had in view the estab-
- ↑ 'In 1851,' writes Mrs Brown, 'I had 40 in my family at $2.50 per week; and mixed with my own hands 3,423 pounds of flour in less than 5 months.' Yet she was a small woman, had been lame many years, and was nearly 70 years of age. She died in 1857. See Or. Argus, May 17, 1856; Portland West Shore, Dec., 1879.
- ↑ Atkinson was born in Newbury, Vermont. He was related to Josiah Little of Massachusetts. One of his aunts, born in 1760, Mrs Anne Harris, lived to within 4 months of the age of 100 years, and remembered well the feeling caused in Newburyport one Sunday morning by the tidings of the death of the great preacher Whitefield; and also the events of the French empire and American revolution. Mr Atkinson left Boston, with his wife, in October 1847, on board the bark Samoset, Captain Hollis, and reached the Hawaiian Islands in the following February, whence he sailed again for the Columbia in the Hudson's Bay Company's bark Cowlitz, Captain Weyington, May 23d, arriving at Vancouver on the 20th of June 1848. He at once entered upon the duties of his profession, organized the Oregon association of Congregational ministers, also the Oregon tract society, and joined in the effort to found a school at Forest Grove. He corresponded for a time with the Home Missionary, a Boston publication, from which I have gathered some fragments of the history of Oregon from 1848 to 1851, during the height of the gold excitement. Mr Atkinson became pastor of the Congregational church in Oregon City in 1853; and was for many years the pastor of the first Congregational
