BURRITT COLLEGE CENTENNIAL ADDRESS
By Charles Lee Lewis
Class of 1903

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

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

Van Buren County had been formed from White, Warren,and Bledsoe Counties only about eight years previously, andSpencer had been settled shortly afterwards as the county seat.The little village was then quite isolated. The roads wererough, and a journey to Sparta or McMinnville, which nowtakes but a short time, then required several hours particularlyon 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 Tullahomato McMinnville was not finished until 1858. There werenot many colleges in this part of the state. Irving College,rebuilt in 1845 and then chartered by the legislature, wasflourishing, but the Cumberland Female College was not foundedin McMinnville until 1850. When Burritt College was established,there was no Vanderbilt University, no University of theSouth at Sewanee, no University of Tennessee, no PeabodyCollege. Tennessee had been a state only 52 years; Nashvillehad been the capital city only five years and the Capitol, whichhad been commenced in 1845 with official ceremony, was quiteunfinished.

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

In American literature, 1848 was the year in which EdgarAllen Poe ended his unhappy life; the year in which Emerson,Lowell, Irving, Longfellow, Parkman, Thoreau, and Whittierall published books. The following year appeared Hawthorne’sScarlet Letter. In England, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning,Tennyson, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, and Carlyle were flourishing,Tha

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