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But the sum was raised. Moreover, this wise and good man was placed at the head of the school. Under him, the command to halt was never once sounded. The institution moved steadily forward, but after six years, he relinquished the helm. Possibly for the reason that his successors were men of books, who knew comparatively little of practical agriculture, there followed a laxity in the management of affairs. Dissatisfaction arose, and in the course of time the manual school feature was abandoned.

In 1837, the name of the school was changed from Mercer Institute to Mercer University; a charter was obtained from the Legislature; and a fund of $100,000 was raised among the Georgia Baptists with which to give it a permanent and substantial endowment. The first graduating exercises were held in the summer of 1841, when diplomas were awarded to three young men. Richard Malcolm Johnston, who became one of the foremost educators and authors of his day; Benjamin F. Thorpe, afterwards an eminent divine; and Dr. A. R. Wellborn, a successful practitioner of medicine, received degrees on this occasion. In 1840 the Theological Department was added; and Dr. Adiel Sherwood was put at the head of the newly organized school of the prophets. The name of this stalwart and sturdy old pioneer is still fragrant in the annals of Georgia.

At the outbreak of the Civil war, the senior classmen at Penfield entered the Confederate army almost to a man, and there were few better soldiers. Though the college did not formally suspend until 1865, it maintained an existence which was purely nominal. Most of the trustees were at the front. Widespread demoralization prevailed. So, after the invasion of the state by Sherman, the faculty with great reluctance closed the doors. Professors Sanford and Willet, the two senior members of the faculty, opened a school in the college building and held a quasi-commencement, but the lamp of learning could not be rescued from extinction. It flickered dimly, amid the ruins, enough to reveal the chaotic conditions; and then expired in darkness.

For seven years after the war there came a break in the academic life of Mercer. The work of rehabilitation was slow, due to the utter prostration of the state, during the period of Reconstruction. Finally, when the institution again arose, it was upon the heights of Macon, where it today stands. Prior to the war two separate efforts were made by Griffin to secure Mercer, but without success. The various presidents of Mercer University, in the order of service, have been as follows:

Rev. Billington M. Sanders, Prin

cipal and President.

Rev. Otis Smith.

Rev. John L. Dagg, D.D.

Rev. Nathaniel M. Crawford, D.D.

Rev. H. H. Tucker, D.D.
Rev. Archibald J. Battle, D.D.
Rev. G. A. Nunnally, D.D.
Pinckney D. Pollock, LL.D.
Rev. S. Y. Jameson, D.D.

Some of these executive heads have been amongst the most eminent theologians and educators of the South.

Dr. Patrick H. Mell, afterwards Chancellor of the University of Georgia; Dr. Shaler G. Hillyer, Prof. William G. Woodfin, and others, also taught for a while at Mercer. Perhaps the most distinguished laymen who have occupied chairs in the institution were Prof. S. P. Sanford and Prof. J. E. Willet. The former headed the department of mathematics. The latter taught the natural sciences. Both were identified with the institution for something like fifty years and both were men of broad scholarship. The text-books on mathematics compiled by Professor Sanford are still extensively used.

Two and a half miles to the west of Milledgeville there flourished before the Civil war an institution of learning on whose alumni rolls the name of Sidney Lanier blazes like a star of the first magnitude, and from which a recent chief executive of Georgia, Joseph M. Brown, received his diploma-Oglethorpe University. This was one of the first of Georgia's schools to receive a charter. It was located at a place called Midway, after the famous settlement on the Georgia coast. During the brief quarter of a century in which it flourished it made a record, the influence of which will be felt to the end of time; but at the outbreak of the Civil war Oglethorpe went to the front. Professors, students, and alumni-all enlisted. No institution made greater contributions to the Confederate army in proportion to its numerical strength; and with the Conquered Banner at Appomattox it went down to rise no more—at least upon the hills of the Oconee.

The story of how the institution came into existence may be briefly told. For years there existed under the fostering care of the Educational Board of Georgia two manual labor schools: the Midway Seminary and the Gwinnett Institute; and when the dissolution of the board necessitated a division of interest, the trustees of Midway Seminary, in the spring of 1835, tendered the school to Hopewell Presbytery, believing that ecclesiastical supervision might yield better results. The offer was accepted, and a committee appointed to report on the expediency of elevating the school to college rank. As chairman of the committee, Hon. Eugenius A. Nisbet, afterwards judge of the Supreme Court of Georgia, submitted a report in which strong grounds were taken in favor of an institution of the proposed character to be under the exclusive government and control of the Presbyterian Church. The report met with unanimous adoption. Accordingly, a board of trustees consisting of twenty-four members, was appointed by Presbytery to take charge of Oglethorpe University, the name by which the new school was to be known. The first meeting of the board was held at Milledgeville, on October 21, 1835, and within two months thereafter a charter was procured from the General Assembly of Georgia.*

were:

* Chartered, December 21, 1835, the original trustees of Oglethorpe University Thomas Goulding, S. S. Davis, S. J. Cassels, S. K. Talmadge, J. C. Patterson, H. S. Pratt, Robert Quarterman, Charles W. Howard, C. C. Jones, Joseph H. Lumpkin, Washington Poe, Eugenius A. Nisbet, William W. Holt, B. E. Hand, Richard K. Hines, Samuel Rockwell, John A. Cuthbert, Tomlinson Fort, J. Billups, Charles C. Mills, Charles P. Gordon, John H. Howard, Thomas B. King and Adam L. Alexander. (Prince's Digest, pp. 877-879.)

Vol. II-3

Under the terms of the charter it was made a penal offense, in the sum of $500, for any one to sell merchandise of any character within a mile and a half of the university, and in addition the form of deeds granted in the sale of lots belonging to the university required the forfeiture of such lots to the institution in the event the law was violated.

On November 24, 1836, the university was organized by the election of the following faculty: Rev. Carlisle P. Beman, D. D., president, to hold the chair of chemistry and natural philosophy; Hon. Eugenius A. Nisbet, vice-president, to teach belles lettres and natural philosophy; Rev. Samuel K. Talmage, professor of ancient languages; Rev. Charles Wallace Howard, chaplain, to teach moral philosophy; and Rev. Nathaniel Macon Crawford, professor of astronomy and mathematics. The cornerstone of the main building was laid on March 31, 1837, at which time an address was delivered by Hon. Joseph Henry Lumpkin, afterwards Chief Justice of Georgia. Dr. Talmage, in writing of the school at a later period, thus describes the building: "It is a brick structure, painted white, two stories high, besides a basement. It is constructed after the Grecian Doric order, without and within. The central part contains the finest college chapel in the United States; its whole dimensions are fifty-two feet front by eighty-nine feet deep, including a colonnade fourteen feet deep, supported by four massive pillars, and the vestibule of the chapel is eleven feet deep. The dimensions of the chapel are forty-eight feet by sixty in the main story, and forty-eight by seventy-one in the gallery, the latter extending over the vestibule. The ceiling of the chapel is in the form of an elliptical arch, resting on a rich cornice and containing a chaste and original centre piece. Attached to the building are two wings, thirty feet front by thirty-four deep, and three stories high; making the entire front of the edifice one. hundred and twelve feet in length. Each story in the wings is divided into a professor's office in front, and a recitation or lecture room in the rear. There are in the basement story and wings sixteen rooms, affording ample accommodations, museum, apparatus and all other conveniences for college purposes. On each side of the campus there was a row of dormitories, one story in height, for the use of the student. The other buildings were the president's house, on the south side, below the dormitories; the academy, a large two-story edifice opposite, on the north side; and an old chapel, the interior of which was converted into recitation rooms.

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On the first Monday in January, 1838-before the main building was finished-the college commenced operations. The attendance by 1842 registered 125 students, of which number, fifty were in the collegiate and seventy-five in the preparatory department. The college year was divided into two sessions: the winter session from January to May and the summer session from June to November. Commencement was usually on the second Wednesday of the last-named month. In the fall of 1839, at the request of the board of trustees, Presbytery tenderred the institution to the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, by which body it was eagerly accepted. President Beman resigned his position in 1841, and Rev. Samuel K. Talmage, a graduate of Princeton

and an uncle of the great Brooklyn divine, was elected to succeed him as president. He remained in office until his death, in 1865, a period of nearly twenty-five years. Toward the close of the war, the exercises. of Oglethorpe University were suspended, due to the lack of necessary funds and to the impoverished condition of the state. Besides, a large percentage of the young men of Georgia were at the front. From 1867 to 1869 feeble efforts to resuscitate it were made. The office of president was repeatedly declined. Finally, Rev. W. M. Cunningham accepted the office, but, on the eve of the college opening, he died. In 1870, Dr. David Wills succeeded him. The school was then removed to Atlanta, where it opened in General Sherman's former headquarters, on Washington Street, diagonally across from the present State Capitol. But the change failed to produce the expected reinvigoration; and in 1872 the doors of Oglethorpe University were closed. In the opinion of many, no greater misfortune ever befell the state. The apparatus was afterward used by the Talmage High School, at Midway, to which school the other property holdings also reverted. Doctor Wills, the last president of the institution, is living today in Washington, D. C., an old man, verging upon the century mark.

During the spring of 1912 a movement to reorganize Oglethorpe University was launched in Atlanta under the vigorous initiative of Rev. Thornwell Jacobs, a most enthusiastic and wide-awake Presbyterian. The idea was pressed in such a way that it fired the imagination of the church, not only in Georgia, but throughout the South. In less than six months over one hundred men of means were found who were willing to lend financial aid to the enterprise; a temporary organization was effected; a beautiful tract of land at Silver Lake, on Peachtree Road, was secured as a donation to the school, and plans devised for laying the cornerstone of greater Oglethorpe University during the monster Presbyterian jubilee, in May, 1913, when four General Assemblies were scheduled to convene in Atlanta: an auspicious time for the Phoenix to rise once more from the ashes.

Two miles north of the Town of Covington is the little village of Oxford. It is reached by a trolley line which meets the Georgia Railroad at Covington, from which point it rapidly transports the visitor to the broad campus grounds of the great school of learning which is here maintained by Georgia Methodists. Called Emory College, in honor of Bishop John Emory, it enjoyed a distinct and independent existence for nearly eighty years, but in 1915 was merged into a far greater institution: Mercer University. The circumstances connected with the establishment of this famous school at Oxford possess an exceptional interest. Dr. George G. Smith, a patriarch of the church, tells the story thus. Says he: "Dr. Olin, who married a Georgia lady and whose property interests were in Georgia, was chosen president of Randolph-Macon College, in Virginia, and was anxious to secure the support of the various Southern conferences. He accordingly asked the Methodists of Georgia to endow a chair in the college with $10,000 and to patronize the institution, giving them some special privileges in return. The conference consented to accept this offer and

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Home of the Late Col. W. W. Clark, Covington, Including Part of the Old Normal School

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