The Home Journal

Winchester, TN

September 20, 1882

H. H. Dulin, Local Editor

Mary Sharp College

__________

Although comparatively a stranger in Winchester, yet not seeing your paper represented at the meeting, I have taken the liberty, unsolicited by any one, to report the truly refreshing opening exercises of the 33d annual session of the time-honored seat of female learning, established a generation ago, in response to the imperious demand of that time, in the language of its founders, “to give a broader and more thorough culture to woman.”

This institution was named after an estimable woman (a native of Virginia), whose grave and headstone (unostentatious by her own request) was placed beside an imposing monument of Tennessee marble, which she had erected over the remains of her husband, and shrouded by evergreens planted by her own hands. This private cemetery is upon her old homestead, some mile perhaps from town. I visited it this morning in company with my wife and found the modest stone, of Italian marble (erected by her niece), shivered into fragments and scattered upon the ground. To this secluded and now beautiful but neglected spot I would think it highly appropriate that each pupil of the College should, once a year, pay a pilgrimage with votive offerings of flowers, not as to the shrine of a tutelary saint, but to gain inspiration from cherishing the memory of an early benefactress of the College, whose inner life was portrayed not only by her generous donation during her life, towards the erection of the buildings, but also some years before the late civil war manumitting her numerous slaves and making ample provision for their transportation to Liberia, and for their comfortable establishment in the land of their fathers....

In approaching the street leading to the building, one is forcibly impressed with the wisdom of its founders in establishing the College in Winchester, upon what is known in the geology of Tennessee as the Highland Rim, a broad elevated expanse of country, extending from the central basin to the Cumberland mountains, whose western escarpments rear an imposing outline of 2,000 feet, just at that distance which “lends enchantment to the view, and robes the mountain in its azure hue....”

Dr. Graves alluded, with touching pathos, to the fact that in the assembly was one of his first graduates in 1856, who, from one of the Southern States, had revisited her old Alma Mater, bearing her sheaves with her in the form of a lovely daughter, whom she had intrusted to their guardian care, and she was now enrolled as a pupil of the Mary Sharp College.

After salutatory and explanatory remarks by the other Professors, the assembly was dismissed and the pupils desired to return at 2 o’clock in the afternoon to be arranged into classes.

Senex.