The Hampton Indian Program

WY-99

Hampton Institute began the Hampton Indian Program to “christianize and civilize” American Indians. The first students arrived at the Institute near midnight on 13 April 1878. They had been incarcerated at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, in an attempt by the U.S. government to control their kinsmen. Later, government officials recruited males and females from 65 tribal groups from the Midwest and Southwest. Approximately 1,388 students participated before the program ended in 1923. Thirty-eight students from the program are interred in the integrated campus cemetery. The Hampton Indian Program became the model for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Department of Historic Resources, 2008

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923. Donal F. Lindsey, University of Illinois Press, 1995. Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893. Robert Engs, University Of Tennessee Press, 1999. Ten Years Work for the Indians. Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton Institute Press, 1888. “Indian Education at Hampton Institute” by William H. Robinson, in Stony the Road, edited by Keith Schall, pp 1-33, University Press of Virginia, 1977. “Education in Hues: Red and Black at Hampton Institute, 1878-1893” by David Wallace Adams in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1977, b. 76 #2, pp 159-176. “The Indian school at Hampton, Virginia seen through its Graveyard” by Theodore R. Reinhart in Archaeological Society of Virginia Quarterly Bulletin, volume 43, #1, March 1988, pp 24-39.