Dickinson Family Tree - Person Sheet
Dickinson Family Tree - Person Sheet
Death28 Nov 1845, Athens, GA30
Occupationfounder and first president of Emory University, Atlanta30
FatherCapt. Ignatius Alphonso Few Sr. (1750-1810)
MotherMary Candler (1762-1824)
Notes for Rev. Ignatius Alphonso Few Jr.
inherited Mount Carmel plantation
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<b>Ignatius Alphonso Few
1789-1845
President 1836-1839
</b>
By one of the delectable quirks of history, the first president of Emory, born on April 11, 1789—the month of George Washington's first inauguration—was distantly related to one of Emory's greatest and most influential benefactors, Asa Griggs Candler, who died in the year the Great Depression began. Ignatius Alphonso Few's father, Captain Ignatius Few, had served in the Revolutionary Army under Colonel William Candler and married Candler's daughter Mary before moving to Columbia County, Georgia, where the younger Ignatius was born. Another child of Colonel Candler, son Daniel, was Asa Candler's grandfather. Thus Ignatius Alphonso Few, Emory's founder, was Asa Candler's cousin once-removed. In the South, such bloodlines are no small matter. (I. A. Few was also an ancestor of one of Duke University's great presidents, William Preston Few, who served that university from 1910 until 1940.)
Sent as a young teenager to New Jersey to live with an uncle— "that he might have the benefits of a Northern education"—Few studied for a time at Princeton University and in New York City before returning to Georgia to study the law. By another odd circumstance, during his law studies in Augusta, he crossed paths with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, who would later succeed him as president of Emory.
Few's life at this period seems to have been a peripatetic search for the best use of his many and deep talents. After marrying Salina Carr in 1811, he became a planter, then a colonel in the army, then, again, a gentleman farmer, so absorbed in his studies that he failed to attend to the farm and lost it. Starting a successful law practice in Augusta in 1823, Few continued his reading of skeptical philosophy but was finally overtaken by two events that would change his life forever. The first was a severe hemorrhaging of the lungs, which portended a lifelong and wasting struggle against what was, apparently, tuberculosis. The second event was his conversion to Christianity and his joining the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Admitted to the church as a probationary minister in 1828, he became a charter member of the Georgia Conference when it organized in 1831. By 1835, however, following pastorates in Savannah and Macon and service as presiding elder in the Columbus District, Few was granted "supernumerary" status in the conference because of his poor health, and he turned his attention to his education projects.
In 1834, the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church established a manual labor school on some four hundred acres of Newton County, near the town of Covington. The trustees elected Few to lead the school. When classes began in the fall of 1835, the campus comprised a steward's hall, two faculty houses, six dormitories, a kitchen, a smokehouse, and a few crude outbuildings. As a preparatory school, the Georgia Conference Manual Labor School was designed to train boys and young men for eastern colleges, and to that end it offered three curricula, tailored to students' varying abilities. The basic course of reading, writing, arithmetic, and spelling cost sixteen dollars a year; the course of English grammar, geography, rhetoric, and logic cost twenty dollars; and the advanced course, comparable in its reading list to the freshman year at Yale College, included classical languages, mathematics, and moral and natural philosophy for thirty-two dollars a year. Students devoted three hours a day, five days a week, to cultivating the fields and doing farm chores, earning a few cents an hour. Wages were graduated, depending not on the amount or kind of work the student performed but on how large the student was--the bigger the student, the higher the pay.
The school attracted so many applicants that some five hundred potential students were turned away from its first four years, and families moved to Covington just to be close enough for their sons to enroll in the school. Despite a market avid for the school's particular brand of education, the experiment failed ingloriously. The undisciplined students and inexperienced professors had neither the time nor the will nor the prowess to undertake both the work of scholarship and the full-time running of what was, in its day, a very large farm. Overestimating the bounty they could harvest and the income from tuition, the school's trustees quickly found themselves faced with mounting debts, and within a few years the prospects of success appeared hopeless.
Still, the imaginations of the founders proved as hardy as their fortitude and courage. From the inception of the Manual Labor School, Ignatius Few seems to have envisioned the addition of a regular college, which would carry forward the instruction of the school's graduates. And although the Manual Labor School appeared doomed to sink in red ink (and red clay), the conference considered bending its efforts toward salvaging a grander enterprise.
Few was helped in his aspirations by a Methodist preacher named "Uncle" Allen Turner, whose only footprint in history is the remarks he made at the Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held in Washington, Georgia, in 1834. Sometime during the conference the newly elected president of Randolph-Macon College, in Virginia, appealed to the delegates for funds to support the college. Most of those assembled greeted the plea favorably. Randolph-Macon was, after all, a Methodist institution; its president, Stephen Olin, was a Georgian; and the cause was right. But Turner rose and surprised his fellow delegates by admonishing them to establish their own college in Georgia rather than send their money to Virginia.
Although he failed to sway the conference, which voted to support Randolph-Macon, Turner apparently left an impression. Within a year plans were afoot to act on his suggestion, and on December 10, 1836, fulfilling the petition of a group of Methodists, the Georgia legislature granted a charter to the trustees of the Manual Labor School to establish a college as well. The Manual Labor School would continue to limp along until sometime near the end of 1840, when it closed for good, to be replaced by a preparatory program within Emory College for "sub-freshmen."
In some ways the new college, named for the Methodist Bishop John Emory, was identical to the Manual Labor School. Almost all of the trustees of the school were appointed as trustees of the college, and Few, who had been president of the Manual Labor School Board of Trustees, was elected by the college's trustees to be president of the college. The college trustees bought fourteen hundred acres north of Covington for fourteen thousand dollars and set about planning a town named Oxford, with a college at its hub.
With the laying of a foundation stone in spring of 1838, construction commenced. Perhaps for lack of payment, the contractors failed to finish their work. Nevertheless, with a financial structure that could at best be described as "ethereal," a small faculty at his command, and a four-room dwelling that would serve until the college buildings were finished, Few welcomed fifteen freshmen and sophomores to the college on September 17, 1838. By the end of the term five more had joined the student body. They hailed from as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. Among them were a future Emory president, Osborn L. Smith, and a future member of the faculty, George W. W. Stone.
At the close of the first academic year of Emory College, Few recognized that the labor of organizing the school and college and fending off financial disaster had been more than his weakened constitution could tolerate, and he tendered his resignation on July 17, 1839, to become effective the following January. Although he would continue to serve as president of the Board of Trustees until July 1841, his only remaining public service would be to draft the report on the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, splitting the denomination into southern and northern constituencies over the issue of slavery. The separation was a blow to his spirit, and the work of drafting the report had drained him physically. He died peacefully in Athens, Georgia, on November 21, 1845, and is buried in the town of Oxford, where he had been the first citizen.
Source: <i>A Legacy of Heart and MInd: Emory Since 1836</i>. Gary S. Hauk, PhD
---
<b>Ignatius Alphonso Few
1789-1845
President 1836-1839
</b>
By one of the delectable quirks of history, the first president of Emory, born on April 11, 1789—the month of George Washington's first inauguration—was distantly related to one of Emory's greatest and most influential benefactors, Asa Griggs Candler, who died in the year the Great Depression began. Ignatius Alphonso Few's father, Captain Ignatius Few, had served in the Revolutionary Army under Colonel William Candler and married Candler's daughter Mary before moving to Columbia County, Georgia, where the younger Ignatius was born. Another child of Colonel Candler, son Daniel, was Asa Candler's grandfather. Thus Ignatius Alphonso Few, Emory's founder, was Asa Candler's cousin once-removed. In the South, such bloodlines are no small matter. (I. A. Few was also an ancestor of one of Duke University's great presidents, William Preston Few, who served that university from 1910 until 1940.)
Sent as a young teenager to New Jersey to live with an uncle— "that he might have the benefits of a Northern education"—Few studied for a time at Princeton University and in New York City before returning to Georgia to study the law. By another odd circumstance, during his law studies in Augusta, he crossed paths with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, who would later succeed him as president of Emory.
Few's life at this period seems to have been a peripatetic search for the best use of his many and deep talents. After marrying Salina Carr in 1811, he became a planter, then a colonel in the army, then, again, a gentleman farmer, so absorbed in his studies that he failed to attend to the farm and lost it. Starting a successful law practice in Augusta in 1823, Few continued his reading of skeptical philosophy but was finally overtaken by two events that would change his life forever. The first was a severe hemorrhaging of the lungs, which portended a lifelong and wasting struggle against what was, apparently, tuberculosis. The second event was his conversion to Christianity and his joining the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Admitted to the church as a probationary minister in 1828, he became a charter member of the Georgia Conference when it organized in 1831. By 1835, however, following pastorates in Savannah and Macon and service as presiding elder in the Columbus District, Few was granted "supernumerary" status in the conference because of his poor health, and he turned his attention to his education projects.
In 1834, the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church established a manual labor school on some four hundred acres of Newton County, near the town of Covington. The trustees elected Few to lead the school. When classes began in the fall of 1835, the campus comprised a steward's hall, two faculty houses, six dormitories, a kitchen, a smokehouse, and a few crude outbuildings. As a preparatory school, the Georgia Conference Manual Labor School was designed to train boys and young men for eastern colleges, and to that end it offered three curricula, tailored to students' varying abilities. The basic course of reading, writing, arithmetic, and spelling cost sixteen dollars a year; the course of English grammar, geography, rhetoric, and logic cost twenty dollars; and the advanced course, comparable in its reading list to the freshman year at Yale College, included classical languages, mathematics, and moral and natural philosophy for thirty-two dollars a year. Students devoted three hours a day, five days a week, to cultivating the fields and doing farm chores, earning a few cents an hour. Wages were graduated, depending not on the amount or kind of work the student performed but on how large the student was--the bigger the student, the higher the pay.
The school attracted so many applicants that some five hundred potential students were turned away from its first four years, and families moved to Covington just to be close enough for their sons to enroll in the school. Despite a market avid for the school's particular brand of education, the experiment failed ingloriously. The undisciplined students and inexperienced professors had neither the time nor the will nor the prowess to undertake both the work of scholarship and the full-time running of what was, in its day, a very large farm. Overestimating the bounty they could harvest and the income from tuition, the school's trustees quickly found themselves faced with mounting debts, and within a few years the prospects of success appeared hopeless.
Still, the imaginations of the founders proved as hardy as their fortitude and courage. From the inception of the Manual Labor School, Ignatius Few seems to have envisioned the addition of a regular college, which would carry forward the instruction of the school's graduates. And although the Manual Labor School appeared doomed to sink in red ink (and red clay), the conference considered bending its efforts toward salvaging a grander enterprise.
Few was helped in his aspirations by a Methodist preacher named "Uncle" Allen Turner, whose only footprint in history is the remarks he made at the Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held in Washington, Georgia, in 1834. Sometime during the conference the newly elected president of Randolph-Macon College, in Virginia, appealed to the delegates for funds to support the college. Most of those assembled greeted the plea favorably. Randolph-Macon was, after all, a Methodist institution; its president, Stephen Olin, was a Georgian; and the cause was right. But Turner rose and surprised his fellow delegates by admonishing them to establish their own college in Georgia rather than send their money to Virginia.
Although he failed to sway the conference, which voted to support Randolph-Macon, Turner apparently left an impression. Within a year plans were afoot to act on his suggestion, and on December 10, 1836, fulfilling the petition of a group of Methodists, the Georgia legislature granted a charter to the trustees of the Manual Labor School to establish a college as well. The Manual Labor School would continue to limp along until sometime near the end of 1840, when it closed for good, to be replaced by a preparatory program within Emory College for "sub-freshmen."
In some ways the new college, named for the Methodist Bishop John Emory, was identical to the Manual Labor School. Almost all of the trustees of the school were appointed as trustees of the college, and Few, who had been president of the Manual Labor School Board of Trustees, was elected by the college's trustees to be president of the college. The college trustees bought fourteen hundred acres north of Covington for fourteen thousand dollars and set about planning a town named Oxford, with a college at its hub.
With the laying of a foundation stone in spring of 1838, construction commenced. Perhaps for lack of payment, the contractors failed to finish their work. Nevertheless, with a financial structure that could at best be described as "ethereal," a small faculty at his command, and a four-room dwelling that would serve until the college buildings were finished, Few welcomed fifteen freshmen and sophomores to the college on September 17, 1838. By the end of the term five more had joined the student body. They hailed from as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. Among them were a future Emory president, Osborn L. Smith, and a future member of the faculty, George W. W. Stone.
At the close of the first academic year of Emory College, Few recognized that the labor of organizing the school and college and fending off financial disaster had been more than his weakened constitution could tolerate, and he tendered his resignation on July 17, 1839, to become effective the following January. Although he would continue to serve as president of the Board of Trustees until July 1841, his only remaining public service would be to draft the report on the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, splitting the denomination into southern and northern constituencies over the issue of slavery. The separation was a blow to his spirit, and the work of drafting the report had drained him physically. He died peacefully in Athens, Georgia, on November 21, 1845, and is buried in the town of Oxford, where he had been the first citizen.
Source: <i>A Legacy of Heart and MInd: Emory Since 1836</i>. Gary S. Hauk, PhD