Report-1853, December

The annual report of the Board of Missions.

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Dec. 1853

   The Kansas District is in the bounds of the St. Louis Conference, having been detached from the Indian Mission Conference at the General Conference of 1850, and attached to the St. Louis. It embraces the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandott and Kickapoo Missions, and also the Fort Leavenworth Manual Labor and the Kansas Schools. This district is under the superintendence of Rev. J.T. Peery, from whom an interesting report will be found below. The Fort Leavenworth Manual Labor school is under the superintendence of Rev. Thomas Johnson. We were delighted 1n visiting this school, to find all the favorable reports we had received from others, of its prosperity, its wise and prudent management and direction fully confirmed by all that we saw and heard while there. The school is on a large scale, averaging from 90 to 100 scholars. The children are instructed in all the elementary branches of a good English education, while many are making considerable advancement in Geography, English, Grammar, Arithmetic, &c. The teachers in both departments are well qualified for their stations, and exert the most salutary influence over their pupils. They are not only instructed in hours of school, but they are taught habits of industry, by laboring on the farm, in the shops, and in acquiring the useful arts of housewifery. They all appear contented, well and happy. The location or the school is most beautiful—in a region unsurpassed for fertility and beauty in our whole country, and in the midst of a farm of more than one thousand acres, well enclosed and neatly cultivated.

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[From Annual Reports of Board of Missions, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Copy in vault, K.S.H.S., sent from Nashville, TN.]