Burritt College Centennial Celebration August 13-15, 1948 Address by Charles Lee Lewis Class of 1903 August 14 BURRITT COLLEGE CENTENNIAL ADDRESS _By_ Charles Lee Lewis _Class of 1903_ As Daniel Webster said in his famous speech on the Dartmouth College Case, so do we say of Burritt College, “Though it is a little college, there are those who love it.” That explains why we have gathered here from far and wide to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its founding. A hundred years seems a long time, even to some of us who first became students in this institution more than fifty years ago. Many changes take place in the course of a century. Let us turn back the clock of Time and take a bird’s-eye view of the year 1848, the year when Burritt College received its charter. Van Buren County had been formed from White, Warren, and Bledsoe Counties only about eight years previously, and Spencer had been settled shortly afterwards as the county seat. The little village was then quite isolated. The roads were rough, and a journey to Sparta or McMinnville, which now takes but a short time, then required several hours particularly on the return up the mountain. Though the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railway was under construction in 1848, it was not completed until 1853, and the branch from Tullahoma to McMinnville was not finished until 1858. There were not many colleges in this part of the state. Irving College, rebuilt in 1845 and then chartered by the legislature, was flourishing, but the Cumberland Female College was not founded in McMinnville until 1850. When Burritt College was established, there was no Vanderbilt University, no University of the South at Sewanee, no University of Tennessee, no Peabody College. Tennessee had been a state only 52 years; Nashville had been the capital city only five years and the Capitol, which had been commenced in 1845 with official ceremony, was quite unfinished.