In American literature, 1848 was the year in which Edgar Allen Poe ended his unhappy life; the year in which Emerson, Lowell, Irving, Longfellow, Parkman, Thoreau, and Whittier all published books. The following year appeared Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. In England, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Tennyson, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, and Carlyle were flourishing, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair being published the year before 1848 and Dickens’ David Copperfield the year following.
In the United States the year 1848 was a time of comparative peace and security, of bright hope and golden promise, with land for all who wished it, work and opportunity for the industrious and the ambitious. It was inspiring to live in such a country at such a time; it was likewise a propitious time for a college to begin a long and useful period of service.
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare has one of his characters ask, suggesting that a rose would smell as sweet by any other name. On the contrary, a name bestowed upon a person or institution, when its significance is rightly understood, becomes an important factor in the development of character and individuality. What a wonderful asset there is in the name of Washington and Lee University, bearing the names of two of the greatest men born on this continent! No other American college has such a heritage. Burritt College, however, is among those appropriately and honorably named.
In 1848, Elihu Burritt, for whom the college was named, had for several years been widely known as “The Learned Blacksmith.” By the time he was thirty he was able to read more or less fluently about fifty different languages. At his native town, New Britain, Connecticut, while he was working the hand-bellows to heat a piece of metal in his blacksmith shop, he studied from a book conveniently propped open. This is the reason the seal of Burritt College portrays a blacksmith at work at his anvil. Figuratively, Elihu Burritt had many irons in the fire. In 1848, he was the publisher of a weekly paper in Worcester, Massachusetts, called “The Christian Citizen,” which was devoted to anti-slavery, temperance, peace, and self-culture. It was the first publication of its kind in America to give definite space to the cause of peace. In England in 1846, he drafted the plan for a society called “The League of Universal Brotherhood.” When this college at Spencer was given his name in 1848, Burritt was in Brussels, Belgium, attending a congress of this “Brotherhood,” where he presented a plan for “A Congress of Nations, for the purpose of establishing a well-defined code of international law, and a high court of adjudication to interpret and apply it, in the settlement of all international disputes, which cannot be satisfactorily arranged by negotiation.” Accordingly, Burritt had the vision of what Tennyson some years later prophetically called, in his “Locksley Hall,” “The parliament of men, the federation of the world.” This was nearly a hundred years before the League of Nations, and the United Nations of our time.
Burritt began to lecture when about thirty, his first subject being “Application and Genius,” in which he sought to prove that what was generally thought to be genius was not something peculiar and native but merely the result of long and persistent application. Though he had an international reputation, he was devoted to his native town and the friends of his youth. In the nineteenth provision of his will, he wrote: “Having thus disposed of the property which a kind Providence has put in my possession, in a way which I hope may testify my gratitude for such a gift, I bequeath to this my native town the undying affection of a son who held its esteem and special tokens of consideration above all the honors which he received elsewhere.” I believe you will agree with me when I declare that we have reason to be proud of the name of Burritt College, given in honor of such a scholar and generous-hearted idealist. In one way or another, his ideals became the ideals of the college bearing his name,—true scholarship, the dignity of labor, and service for humanity.
The charter for Burritt College was secured by a board of thirteen trustees. They apparently were not superstitious regarding the number thirteen in those days. This board, of which John Gillentine was the chairman, obtained money for the erection of a college building from citizens of White, Warren, and Van Buren Counties and probably elsewhere. Nathan Trogdon was employed as contractor and builder. The building, a two-story brick structure, a drawing of which appears at the top of the early diplomas, stood about midway between the present main building and Billingsley Hall. Its original foundation could be partly traced when I was a student at the College.
The first president was Isaac Newton Jones. He and W. B. Huddleston were the chief promoters of the college. President Jones, born at Calhoun, McMinn County, Tennessee, was only twenty-six years old when he accepted the presidency of Burritt College. Being the first graduate of Irving College in Warren County, he was both a scholar and a gentleman and a man of great energy. From the beginning, the curriculum of Burritt stressed Greek and Latin, Moral Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, Natural Philosophy, and Evidences of Christianity. For at least sixty years, little change was made in these courses of study, except by addition of other subjects.
After one year, Jones resigned and went to Bedford County where he married Mary Ann Davis. In 1873 he became president of Waters and Walling College in McMinnville; after three years he was elected to the presidency of Manchester College, which he held for five years. He continued to reside in Manchester until his death in 1898. He is remembered in his later years for his venerable appearance, his long white beard covering his chest and reaching almost to his waist.
Jones was succeeded as president of Burritt by William Davis Carnes. In 1809, young Carnes had come, when only four years old, with his parents from South Carolina to McMinnville, where his father Alexander Carnes engaged in the mercantile business. William Carnes completed his education at East Tennessee College (now the University of Tennessee), where he finished the four years’ course in three years. Here he was called “Pop Carnes” as he was already married and had three children. After graduation, he became the principal of the Preparatory Department and continued his studies, receiving the A.M. degree two years later. He then became professor of English Language and Literature in the college. A serious illness caused him to return to his farm in Sequatchie Valley; and after his complete recovery here, he was offered the presidency of Burritt College.
President Carnes introduced two reforms. The first was coeducation, then a novelty against which there was much objection. He met this by building a dormitory for girls as an annex to his residence and by making his daughter Mary head of the Female Department. The other reform was the introduction of scientific physical culture. Both of these are now, a hundred years afterwards, considered necessary in modern education.