Land was the only thing that the state did possess in abundance, and when viewed in the light of the sparse settlement of the country and the imminent danger from the Indians, land was a commodity practically without value. Chancellor Tucker, in his address before the legislature in 1875, says that "probably the whole 40,000 acres could not have been sold for $1000," and cites in proof the law at that time, which gave two hundred acres to each head of a family settling in the state, with fifty acres additional for each member of the household, white or black, young or decrepit. Furthermore, in settling the boundary. between Georgia and South Carolina, five thousand acres of the best land in the grant fell across the line, and could never be recovered by the trustees from South Carolina, nor be replaced by a new grant from the state, although the loss had occurred despite the full compliance on the part of the trustees with all necessary legal measures at the time the session to South Carolina took place.

Do what they would, such a heritage could not be immediately applied for educational purposes. The trustees therefore decided to have the land surveyed off into hundredacre lots, to be leased upon notes to such parties as could be induced to locate upon them. The better to accomplish this object, the town of Greensboro was laid out upon the tract of land then in Franklin but now in Green county, and advantageous terms offered to purchasers of lots and tenants of the adjoining lands. A rent-roll system, however, was but ill suited to the condition of the new state, and it causes no surprise to find that the funds of the university needed only the attention of the financial agent of the

board for a period of thirteen years. By that time six of the original board had either died or left the state, and the remaining seven, after several attempts to get together, at last had a full meeting and filled their roll by electing six new members. When this board met with the board of visitors in January, 1798, to form the Senatus Academicus, they were possessed of $993 in cash and about $6500 in notes for rents and purchase of town lots in Greensboro, a sum which a resolution at that meeting declares to be sufficiently respectable to

the town of Louisville in Jefferson County, at Greensboro in Franklin County, and at other points in Hancock, Columbia, and Wilkes counties, were all broached, but none proved satisfactory. A decision had,

Alonzo Church, D.D.,

PRESIDENT OF FRANKLIN COLLEGE, 1829-1859.

indeed, been reached in 1800, favoring Greensboro, but this was reversed the following year in consequence of the donation of 633 acres by Governor John Milledge, which were accepted as a suitable place for the permanent home of the young university. Upon this tract now stand the college buildings and a large part of the city of Athens.

The site was a beautiful one, upon the high hills overlooking the Oconee River, near a clear, cool spring, and beneath the shade of a grove of oaks and hickory, many

of which still beautify what was once a favorite trysting-place of the Cherokees, and which during eighty-nine years has witnessed the instruction and echoed the youthful eloquence of more than five thou

sand young Georgians. Most conspicuous among these historic trees is the massive old giant which stands just in front of the chapel and is now known as the Bob Toombs Oak. Three

years ago an unsparing thunderbolt greatly disfigured this tree, and fears are entertained for its life. With its death will fall the witness of the earliest as well as the most exciting scenes in the history of the university, scenes which link themselves to the greatest names in Georgia's past and are part of her dearest history.

The contract that had already been authorized for building a wing of the university at Greensboro was now made to apply to the new site, and its execution entrusted to a committee, whose work of building a house suitable for the accommodation of one hundred students was finally completed in 1803. But pursuant to this measure, it was resolved to elect an instructor of youth, who should take charge as soon as possible, who should be the first professor in the institution, and should preside in the absence of a president. Josiah Meigs, LL.D., was chosen to this office, and became the first president of the institution. Professor Meigs had been educated as a lawyer, and practised his profession in New Haven. He had tasted of the pains of colonial journalism, and for a number of years had lectured on scientific subjects in Yale College as the incumbent of the chair of natural philosophy and astronomy. With singular self-abnegation he gave up this position of comparative ease and comfort and agreed to move himself and his large family, by what was then a long and tedious journey, to settle in a wilderness, and there to found without money or appliances an

institution of higher learning. Says Dr. Alonzo Church:

Few men ever labored with more untiring zeal and unremitting industry than this faithful pioneer in the cause of learning in our state. His views on the subject of education were enlarged, trustees and the legislature were judicious-such as fully sustained his character as a man of learning and one who had carefully studied the subject of general education. The only failure on his part was a failure to accomplish an impossibility to build up without means a flourishing college. The Israelites had not a harder task when required to make bricks without straw than President Meigs when, under such circumstances, he was required to raise up in a few years an institution which would compare with those which had been long established and well endowed. President Meigs commenced the exercises of the university when no college building of any description had been erected. Recitations were often heard and lec

and the measures which he recommended to the

tures delivered under the shade of the forest oak; and for years he had almost the entire instruction of the college, aided only by a tutor or some mem

Of the first commencement of Franklin College, held in 1804 under a rude arbor constructed of the branches of trees, it is written: "In this rustic chapel, surrounded by the primeval forest and amidst a gathering of a few friends of the college and a still larger number of persons assembled to witness the novel scene, Colonel Gibson Clarke, Hon. Augustus S. Clayton, General Jeptha V. Harris, Colonel William H. Jackson, Professor James Jackson, Thomas Erwin, Jarid Irwin, Robert Rutherford, Williams Rutherford, and William Williamson graduated with the honors of the institution."

These early pictures of the university are not only full of a rugged pathos; they stand alone in the educational history of the country. Other states have found difficulty in building up their universities, but

none of them have ventured to send forth their young offspring into the world with

from 1812 to 1816, proved by its enhanced difficulties the necessity of abandoning the system altogether. The institution "well nigh languished to despair" ere the legislature authorized a sale of the thirty-five thousand acres and the investment of the proceeds in a more reliable source of reve

Andrew A. Lipscomb, D.D., LL.D., CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, 1860-1874.

nue.

The final act, which really placed the college on its feet, was that of 1821, whereby the notes and bonds arising from the sale of the college lands, amounting to $150,000, were deposited in the state treasury, and the sum of $100,000, equal to two-thirds of their value, was invested in bank stock, upon which the legislature guaranteed an interest of eight per cent for all time. This was doubtless a fair bargain, in view of the high rate of interest paid and the risk upon insolvent notes, which the state assumed. "Thereafter," writes Governor Wilson Lumpkin in a somewhat paradoxical sentence, "the limited financial condition of the university was without serious embarrassment." Following this, the problem of how to employ a full corps of professors, pay them reasonable salaries, build residences for them, build new college edifices, increase the library and philosophical apparatus, and expand the scope of the institution, upon an income of $15,000 a year, annually embarrassed the board until 1830. At this time a disastrous fire, offset by but slight increase of income, had enhanced the difficulty of its solution; and the weight of it continued to press even after the addition of $17,000 from the landscript fund in 1872, which increased the income to $30,000, but at the same time that the needs of the institution were expanded far beyond that sum. Nor does it appear that either from the generosity

of the state, or of private parties, this pressure of finances has ever been sufficiently relieved to place the institution where the needs of the state and the advance of educational thought demand.

While the charter of the institution covered an expanded system as the University of Georgia, that title was not assumed until a far later date. The portion first established has since 1801 borne the name of Franklin College, and has been the nucleus about which the expansion of the institution, starting in 1859, has proceeded.

The educational policy of the college down to 1859 was based on the idea of a close curriculum of four years, in which Latin, Greek, and mathematics formed the rigid, triangular backbone. All the students were put through the same exercises, and all alike received the regular A.B. diploma. The original draft by the trustees in 1800 provides a six years' course, but two of these years were assigned to the grammar school established in connection with the college, leaving four regular classes for the college, as in Yale and Harvard. The text-books in each class were fully prescribed, but only the antiquarian in educational history would at this day recognize Ruddiman's Latin Grammar, Pike's Arithmetic, Bonnycastle's Mensuration, and Duncan's Logic as even passing acquaintances. Blair's Rhetoric, found on the original list, was known in the college curriculum as late as 1879. Natural philosophy was to be taught in all possible cases by direct experiment, and forensic disputations were ordained of weekly occurrence and in the presence of the tutors. The students' work began with prayers at sunrise, and continued with recitations until nine o'clock; then an hour for breakfast; recitations again until twelve, and two hours for dinner, followed by a study period from two until five. This plan of education was administered under a code of laws first passed in 1803, and revised and greatly extended in 1819. Both codes look with great solicitude to the conduct and morals of the students, and place almost unlimited power in the hands of the president. Tutorial espionage and the fear of punishment were the principles upon which the control of the students proceeded. A tuition fee, at first twentyfour dollars, and ranging afterwards through

intermediate figures up to seventy-five dollars, was an important part of the system.

The trustees had meantime done much towards the equipment of the college; but they were met in 1830 by a disastrous fire, which laid in ruins the best building on the campus, and destroyed the valuable library and the philosophical apparatus it contained. Serious as was the loss, it opened the deaf ears of the legislature; and an appropriation of $6000 per annum,

Patrick H. Mell, D.D., LL.D., CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, 1878-1888.

continued until 1841, together with a $10,000 loan afterwards repaid, prevented the suspension of exercises, and restored the lost building and part of its equipments. The faculty at this time embraced a president and six professors.

The radical change through which all of the old institutions of the country have been obliged to pass to reach a sympathy with modern ideas of education began to make itself felt in Franklin College during the presidency of Dr. Alonzo Church, in the year 1856. The existing system was first attacked not on the side of the classics, but at the weaker point of its discipline. The disaffection came from the ranks of the faculty, many of whom were unwilling to waste their energies in the unpleasant