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The reason we need to rebuild the gateposts at Kump Education Center is to remind ourselves of the most basic lessons of the Great Depression. Any person may be down on their luck, and all people can help others in a free society. These are the underlying opportunities that Roosevelt's New Deal offered Americans to fight against the Great Depression.
Like many gateposts in Elkins and other towns in the 1930s, the Kump gateposts were used by hobos during the Depression to let other Hobos know that they could find food at the kitchen door and/or sleep in the barns wherever caring people lived. These Hoe Boys were willing to work, and they often carried hoes so they could weed the gardens of their benefactors.
Phillip Lee and Ed Devine, who have been working on the plaster at Kump Center, have told me that there are similarities between the Hobo's "Code of the Road" and the symbols used to help runaway slaves find their way to freedom along the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. In both cases, fugitives made their way to freedom without being able to read.
The "Code of the Road" let poor, illiterate men know where they could find food at the back door or sleep in the barn. Hobos used images of dogs or guns to let each other know they might be unsafe if local people were hostile. Runaway slaves used hashtags for symbols of danger and they learned to look for the Big Dipper at night or "follow the drinking gourd" north to freedom.
Along the way both groups of fugitives had to depend on the kindness of understanding strangers. Harriet Tubman was one of the best known black "conductors" who helped many slaves from "station to station" as they traveled north on the Underground Railroad. The Hobos or Hoe Boys rode in freight cars or hung on trains from town to town. They could talk with people at the homes where they found food, and they would often use their hoes to weed the gardens of their benefactors.
Recognition of the fact that immigrants, people of color, and white people may need help when they are down on their luck is a basic concept that all Americans need to keep in mind. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not walk after he had Polio, and he had to depend on others to lift him in and out of cars.
The fact that illiterate people were able to find symbols to help them communicate is a credit to their great natural intelligence, but the fact that slaves were not allowed to go to school was because their owners knew that education is necessary for members of a free society.
Kump Education Center is committed to supporting public schools and teachers now because we believe that all children need the opportunity to learn to read, understand basic math, and use information technology to be able to vote intelligently and earn a good living in the 21st Century.