[Footnote 8: _First Annual Report of the Anti-slavery Society of Canada_, 1852, Appendix, p. 22.] [Footnote 9: _Ibid_., p. 15.] The most helpful schools, however, were not those maintained by the state. Travelers in Canada found the colored mission schools with a larger attendance and doing better work than those maintained at public expense.[1] The rise of the mission schools was due to the effort to "furnish the conditions under which whatever appreciation of education there was native in a community of Negroes, or whatever taste for it could be awakened there," might be "free to assert itself unhindered by real or imagined opposition."[2] There were no such schools in 1830, but by 1838 philanthropists had established the first mission among the Canadian refugees.[3] The English Colonial Church and School Society organized schools at London, Amherstburg, and Colchester. Certain religious organizations of the United States sent ten or more teachers to these settlements.[4] In 1839 these workers were conducting four schools while Rev. Hiram Wilson, their inspector, probably had several other institutions under his supervision.[5] In 1844 Levi Coffin found a large school at Isaac Rice's mission at Fort Maiden or Amherstburg.[6] Rice had toiled among these people six years, receiving very little financial aid, and suffering unusual hardships.[7] Mr. E. Child, a graduate of Oneida Institute, was later added to the corps of mission teachers.[8] In 1852 Mrs. Laura S. Haviland was secured to teach the school of the colony of "Refugees' Home," where the colored people had built a structure "for school and meeting purposes."[9] On Sundays the schoolhouses and churches were crowded by eager seekers, many of whom lived miles away. Among these earnest students a traveler saw an aged couple more than eighty years old.[10] These elementary schools broke the way for a higher institution at Dawn, known as the Manual Labor Institute. [Footnote 1: Drew, _A North-side View of Slavery_, pp. 118, 147, 235, 341, and 342.] [Footnote 2: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p. 229.] [Footnote 3: _Father Henson's Story of His Own Life_, p. 209.] [Footnote 4: _First Annual Report of the Anti-slavery Society of Canada_, 1852, p. 22.] [Footnote 5: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p. 199.]