Washington and Lee University - Calyx Yearbook (Lexington, VA)

Page 8 text:

MAYi 7 ' 57 Uobert R o L o G u The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Robert Edward Lee is a memorable occasion from any point of view, and has a dual significance from the standpoint of Washington and Lee University. Not only do we respect General Lee as a man who believed in a cause and gave up all to defend this cause, but also as a man who ' s guidance and faith formed the foundation on which Washington and Lee has grown to its present stature. Thus, in the realization of this fact, the staff of the 1957 Calyx has dedicated this yearbook to Robert Edward Lee, the man and the ideal .

Page 10 text:

' ' ir = STRATFORD HALL, LEE ' S BIRTHPLACE AN INTANGIBLE HERITAGE 1865. Virginia, the prostrate wreck of a state made a battlefield, swallowed her defeat and tried to rise again. It was an agonizing task: her economy was paralyzed, her houses, farms and cities were burned, her youth were dead or maimed. Little Washington College, which before the catastrophe had been a fairly prosperous, though rural institution, lay, like Virginia herself, an empty shell under the summer sun. The Union troops had departed. What remained was hardly a college — a scarred group of brick buildings, a few splintered desks, a decimated and weather-worn irary, and a heritage. The students were gone, and most of them could never again be reached through human agency; there was a pitiful remnant of what once had been a faculty, a very tired remnant. The six trustees who met on that August morning had before them a for- midable, almost impossible, task: build a new college on the ruins of the old — build it on borrowed money, promises, and on an idea. The names of those six men are Httle remembered today. What measure of fame they have arises from the presence of their names t the foot of a letter from Robert E. Lee. Lee ' s letter was in reply to an invitation from these six men to accept the presidency of Washington College. He hesitated at first, because he felt that his name, indel- ibly printed as it was upon the mind of every man who had suffered to defeat the South, would jeopardize the recovery of Washington College, and cause injury to an institution which it would be my highest desire to advance. But the trustees persisted, and finally he discarded his anxieties and set to work to build a school. There was little to work with, but he made it seem more than enough. He revitalized the school of liberal arts, which had constituted the whole of the ante- bellum college, and then went on to establish a law school, a department of engineering, a business school, and a department of journalism — the first in the country. When he died on October 12, 1870, there were more than four hundred students enrolled at Washington College. The endowment, through the