Burritt College Centennial Celebration (Illustrated)

As Daniel Webster said in his famous speech on the Dartmouth College Case, so do we say of Burritt College, “Though it is a little college, there are those who love it.” That explains why we have gathered here from far and wide to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its founding.

A hundred years seems a long time, even to some of us who first became students in this institution more than fifty years ago. Many changes take place in the course of a century. Let us turn back the clock of Time and take a bird’s-eye view of the year 1848, the year when Burritt College received its charter.

Van Buren County had been formed from White, Warren, and Bledsoe Counties only about eight years previously, and Spencer had been settled shortly afterwards as the county seat. The little village was then quite isolated. The roads were rough, and a journey to Sparta or McMinnville, which now takes but a short time, then required several hours particularly on the return up the mountain. Though the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railway was under construction in 1848, it was not completed until 1853, and the branch from Tullahoma to McMinnville was not finished until 1858. There were not many colleges in this part of the state. Irving College, rebuilt in 1845 and then chartered by the legislature, was flourishing, but the Cumberland Female College was not founded in McMinnville until 1850. When Burritt College was established, there was no Vanderbilt University, no University of the South at Sewanee, no University of Tennessee, no Peabody College. Tennessee had been a state only 52 years; Nashville had been the capital city only five years and the Capitol, which had been commenced in 1845 with official ceremony, was quite unfinished.

In January, 1848, peace was signed ending our war with Mexico. Also in January, gold was discovered near Sutter’s Fort in California. Oregon was organized as a free territory in [4] August, and Wisconsin was admitted that year as the thirtieth state. At that time the only states west of the Mississippi River were Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. That year Zachary Taylor was elected President of the United States. In Europe, 1848 was a year of political upheaval. There were revolutions in Austria, Prussia, Hungary, Spain, and Italy. In France, King Louis Philippe fled and Louis Napoleon became President of the Second Republic. Europe was in ferment then as now, one hundred years later; but then the United States was guided by the Monroe Doctrine, only recently promulgated, and was not burdened, like Atlas, with the world on its shoulders, as it is today.

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 [5] 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,