struggles, its transformation into Cumberland College and its 

 final metamorphosis into the University of Nashville in 1825. 



Rev. Thomas B. Craighead was the first president of the new 

 academy and for twenty years he taught this school in his own 

 church building. In 1806 the name was changed to Cumberland 

 College in the hope it might be the recipient of one-half of the 

 100,000 acres which the Federal Congress had decided to grant 

 for the support of two colleges, one in the eastern and the other 

 western part of the State. But the college became involved in 

 the mazes of the land controversies, and did not prosper for this 

 reason and for other reasons, until the advent of Dr. Phillip 

 Lindsley, who came to Nashville in 1824 and was elected presi- 

 dent of the college. 



At the time of his election this famous educator was vice- 

 President of Princeton and in the very flower of his great ability 

 and enthusiasm ; and for the ensuing twenty-five years the career 

 of Cumberland College, which, in 1825, became the University 

 of Nashville was bound up in the career of its remarkable presi- 

 dent. 



Lindsley, like Doak and Craighead, was an enthusiastic edu- 

 cator, and his intention was to make the University of Nashville 

 the equal of the great colleges North and East. He entered upon 

 his work and conducted it with broad catholicity and comprehen- 

 sion under the most adverse conditions, such as lack of funds, the 

 want of an effective common school system and of preparatory 

 schools, and the educational crudeness of a citizenship but recent- 

 ly emerged from the struggles with the Indians and with the 

 hardships of the wilderness. Nevertheless his powerful appeals 

 by speech and by pen, and the undeniable merits of his powerful 

 school were felt in the gradual emergence of a sentiment for edu- 

 cation which laid the foundations for the present greatness and 

 grandeur of this institution in particular and for Tennessee 

 schools in general. 



The Board of Trustees during Lindsley's reign included many 

 of the most influential public men of the State, and from its 1,000 

 students, the aggregate number from 1825 to 1850, came twenty- 

 eight members of Congress and a correspondingly large number 

 of eminent men in other walk of life. Phillip Lindsley was, 

 without question, the greatest educational force in Tennessee in 

 his day; indeed, one of the greatest educational forces of the 

 whole country in the nineteenth century, a force comparable to 

 Mann and Barnard and Wayland and Sears, a force which made 

 of a weak school a strong university which is to-day a response 

 to his prophetic faith. For from the beginnings enumerated this 

 institution has expanded until it now embraces the famous Pea- 

 body Normal College, the Winthrop Model School, the Montgom- 



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