246 Singing Valleys 



that rich soil, started their own seminary at Lexington. The 

 educational ideas on which it was founded in 1788 originated 

 in Williamsburg. But these ideas, like the men who carried 

 them, had crossed the mountains. The classic pattern was 

 abandoned in favor of utility. The Transylvania Seminary was 

 the first intellectual center west of the Alleghenies. The tuition 

 was 53 year, half of it payable in corn, pork or tobacco. 

 Board cost 9; but all of this could be paid in barter. 



Kentucky's amazingly rapid growth from a population of 

 sixty-one thousand whites three years after the opening of the 

 Seminary to 180,000 in 1797, kept the Seminary filled with 

 students. The boys who studied there, who walked across the 

 fields of bluegrass to talk with Henry Clay on his six-hundred 

 acre farm, or who crossed Clark's Ferry to the mill for a 

 glimpse of the old scout, nonetheless a hero for his affection 

 for the jug of corn whiskey beside his chair, who saw the 

 militia mobilize and march north to fight the British in 

 Canada, received an education which was acutely alive and of 

 the time. Harvard, Yale, William and Mary were as remote 

 from the scene where America was being made as some 

 medieval cloister. But Lexington was on the frontier where 

 things were happening. 



When those boys went out to raw, new settlements in Il- 

 linois, Indiana, Missouri and farther west they carried into 

 the wilderness ideals of education which were to leave an in- 

 delible stamp on our American culture. The constitution of 

 Illinois, framed in 1816, called for "a general system of educa- 

 tion ascending in regular gradation from township schools to 

 a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally 

 open to all." 



New England had never dreamed such a dream. It was in 

 the corn belt that the idea of the state university came into 

 being. What made the essential difference between these state 

 institutions and the old endowed universities in the East was 

 the strong link between the first and the public schools of its 

 state. In those schools every pupil was encouraged to seek 



