438 A BICENTENNIAL HISTORY OF MISSISSIPPI by the county. The sole academic building, the Lyceum, was patterned by English architect William Nicholl after an Ionic temple near Athens. A chapel and observatory were added a few years later. The first students of the university found much wanting: some of the classrooms were without desks, chairs, and benches; the Board of Trustees had not ordered textbooks; there was no library; and the two dormitories were filled to overflowing. The original faculty consisted of four scholars. The first president, George F. Holmes, as was the custom in colleges and universities, taught moral philosophy. Poor health forced Holmes to resign after a year. The Board of Trustees replaced him with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Longstreet, a Methodist minister and graduate of Yale, served as the president of Emory College in Georgia for thirteen years. Today, he is best known as the author of Georgia Scenes, a series of humorous sketches lampooning Southern rural folkways. Under Longstreet, the university functioned as a typical early-nineteenth-century institution of learning. The curriculum was heavily based on the classics. The entrance examination tested proficiency in English, grammar, composition, arithmetic, and geography and “six books of The Aeneid of Virgil, and Cicero’s Orations, together with the Greek Reader, and the Latin and Greek grammars, including Latin Prosody.” Learning was by rote memorization and oral recitation. In addition, there was a heavy emphasis on religious devotion. The emphasis in the classical tradition was to discipline the mind and character, not to analyze or expand the pool of human knowledge. Longstreet’s successor, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, arrived as professor of mathematics in 1854. An Episcopal minister, he was born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale. He replaced Longstreet in 1856. Barnard had great ambitions, the utmost being to transform the sleepy, rural school into a great university. His model was the revolutionary changes in higher education coming out of Germany. In March 1858, Barnard published wrote his controversial letter to the Board of Trustees of the University of Mississippi detailing his plans for a curriculum encom-passing all the branches of science, medicine, agriculture, law, civil and political history, and oriental learning. A new emphasis focused on graduate training and research. Barnard felt a state university should produce and disseminate knowledge useful to citizens in the fields of geology, agriculture, and meteorology. Barnard convinced the legislature to fund an observatory and equip it with the finest and largest telescope available, an eight- inch Newtonian constructed in London. Barnard’s reforms sparked bitter criticism from the evangelical churches, which labeled the university a “citadel of atheism” neglecting Christian instruction for modern disciplines. More ominously, the state press, stung by Barnard’s criticism of the backward state of Mississippi education, accused it of being a “hotbed of abolitionism” and Barnard, as a Yankee, of being unreliable in his defense of slavery. Holly Springs Prior to the Civil War, the town of Holly Springs emerged as a boomtown, often called the capital of North Mississippi. The town was located in the center of Marshall County, known as the Empire County, with the largest population in the state by 1850, with 14,271 whites and 15,147 African Americans. Marshall County in 1860 produced more bales of cotton, 49,348, than any other county in the United States. In 1825, Martyn Station, a Presbyterian mission, was founded near the home of Thomas Love, a Tory who fled west during the American Revolution. Love married into the mixed-blood Colbert clan. The mission was also called Love Village because of the numerous family members living there. Other early settlers included Robert Burrell Alexander of Virginia, perhaps the first American settler in Marshall County. Alexander built a popular tavern near the spring for which the town was named. The tavern was the common “dogtrot” design favored by pioneers, described as “two rough-hewn log rooms, with a passage between and a board shelter to eat under.” A parcel of fifty acres was donated by the early land speculators to Marshall County for a government seat, with the hope it would increase the value of their remaining holdings. The Board of Supervisors chose the site as the county seat because of its proximity to the center of Marshall County. The town was incorporated on May 12, 1837. Only a year later, Holly Springs boasted fourteen law offices, six physicians, five churches, three hotels, and nine dry goods stores. The original campus consisted of six buildings on a square mile of rolling land covered by virgin forest donated by the county.