[365] refinement, where the corn waved its tassels, and the wheat bowed to the wind, by their rude log huts in the wilderness, there also the vine clambered, and the rose and lily bloomed. In 1749, near Greeneville, in Augusta county—and Augusta county was then an empire stretching from the Blue Ridge mountains to the Mississippi river—in 1749, Robert Alexander, a Scotch-Irish immigrant, who was a Master of Arts of Trinity College, Dublin, established there ‘The Augusta Academy’—the first classical school in the Valley of Virginia. Under his successor, Rev. John Brown, the academy was first moved to ‘Old Providence,’ and again to ‘New Providence church,’ and just before the Revolution, for a third time, to Mount Pleasant, near Fairfield, in the new county of Rockbridge. In 1776, as the revolutionary fires were kindling, there came to its head as principal William Graham, of worthy memory, who had been a class-mate and special friend of Harry Lee at Princeton College; and at the first meeting of the trustees after the battle of Lexington, while Harry Lee was donning his sword for battle, they baptized it as ‘Liberty Hall Academy.’ Another removal followed, in 1777, to near the old Timber-Ridge church; but finally, in 1785, the academy rested from its wanderings near Lexington, the little town which too had caught the flame of revolution, and was the first to take the name of that early battle-ground of the great rebellion, where
The embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
