State

Dr. Caldwell and His Log University This remarkable man started his own education at 25, yet he taught dozens of state leaders and filled the Presbyterian pnlpits of North Carolina. By AUBREY LEE BROOKS Judge Archibald Murphcy in an ad¬ dress before the literary societies of the University of North Carolina in 1827 said: "The most prominent and useful of the early schools was kept by Dr. David Caldwell of Guilford County. . . . The usefulness of Dr. Caldwell to the literature of North Carolina will never be sufficiently ap¬ preciated." The early years of David Caldwell constitute a striking prelude to his ac¬ complishments in later life. He was born on a Lancaster County, Pennsyl¬ vania, farm in 1725, the eldest of four sons. When he was seventeen years old his father apprenticed him to a house mechanic with whom he worked until he became twenty-one years of age. He then worked four more years on his own account as a house car¬ penter. At twenty-five, he had but little education and was apparently unam¬ bitious. About this time he attended a religious revival and was converted. With his spirtual awakening came a consuming desire to obtain an educa¬ tion and to devote his life to the sen- ice of mankind both intellectually and spiritually. With a religious fervor and a supreme determination, he started from scratch, first in a grammar school through all the grades, and thence to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) where he en¬ tered the freshman class. At the time he became a student at Princeton the requirements for ad¬ mission to the freshman class were as follows: “Candidates for admission into the lowest or freshman class must be capable of composing grammatical Latin, translating Virgil, Cicero’s Ora¬ tions and the Four Evangelists in Greek — and by a later order must un- I)r. Da' id Caldwell derstand the principal rules of vulgar arithmetic." It is recorded that he fre¬ quently studied all night — sitting up with his clothes on — nothing daunted him, for he had a great vision and an insatiable desire for learning. I le was among the first of the Pres¬ byterian ministers who came to North Carolina to join that ever increasing host of Scotch and Scotch-Irish Pres¬ byterians who had taken up residence in the state and who have contributed so much to the intellectual and re¬ ligious culture of the state. Two churches — the Alamance and the Buf- NOTE The accompanying story is a con¬ densation of a paper read at a meet¬ ing of the Historical Society of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Nov. 4. 1949. The full text of the paper recently appeared in the North Carolina His¬ torical Review. falo — had been organized in what was later to be Guilford County, and he was installed as pastor of both — a po¬ sition which he retained for sixty years. In 1766 David Caldwell married Rachel Craighead, the daughter of Dr. Alexander Craighead, of Charlotte, and they established their home a few miles west of what is now Greensboro. His salary as minister of the two churches was only $200 a year, to be paid in grain. Since this meagre income would not support him and his family, he purchased a farm, built a two-story log cabin with a chimney in the middle, and opened there a school. With two short intermissions occasioned by the Revolutionary War, he continued to conduct this school for forty years. And what a school: Caruthcrs says that it attained the greatest reputa¬ tion of any school south of the Po¬ tomac River. Students came there from many parts of North Carolina and from every state in the South. There were usually from fifty to sixty stu¬ dents in attendance, and the majority of them found living accommodations in the homes throughout the scat¬ tered neighborhood. This log cabin schoolhousc served North Carolina and the South as an academy, a college, and a theological seminary, and many of his pupils be¬ came eminent as statesmen, lawyers, judges, physicians, and ministers; some were congressmen and five became governors of states; seven were li¬ censed by the Orange Presbytery in one day and there were not more than three or four members of that presby¬ tery who had not been his pupils, while nearly all of the young men who came into the Presbyterian ministry in North Carolina and in the states to the south and west of it for many years had been trained in his school. It was said of him that Caldwell was instrumental in bringing more men into the learned profession than was any other man of his day in the south- ГНВ STATE, VoL XIX; No. J8. Entered a* second-class matter, June 1, I93J. at the Postoffice at Ralelth. North Carolina, under the act of March J. 1»79. Published by Sharpe Publlshtn* Co.. Inc., Lawyers Bldf., Ralelsh. N. C.