was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her paternal grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church. When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States. Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace. A few years later, her father was elected as mayor of the town in 1897. In 1902 he was called to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist. As an adult, Hurston often used Eatonville as a setting in her stories—it was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern school teachers had visited Eatonville and given Hurston several books that opened her mind to literature. She later described this personal literary awakening as a kind of "birth". Hurston lived for the rest of her childhood in Eatonville and described the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me". Eatonville now holds an annual "Zora! Festival" in her honor. Hurston's mother died in 1904, and her father subsequently married Mattie Moge in 1905. This was considered scandalous, as it was rumored that he had had sexual relations with Moge before his first wife's death. Hurston's father and stepmother sent her to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. They eventually stopped paying her tuition and she was dismissed. Work and study In 1916, Hurston was employed as a maid by the lead singer of the Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. In 1917, she resumed her formal education, attending Morgan College, the high school division of Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland. At this time, apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her year of birth. She graduated from the high school of Morgan State University in 1918. College and slightly after When she was in college, she was introduced to viewing life through an anthropological lens away from Eatonville. One of her main goals was to prove similarities between ethnicities. In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. She was one of the earliest initiates