Thomas R. Price

Prof. Thomas R. Price joined the Century almost immediately after he was called to the Chair of English in Columbia College, twenty years since. He was a native of Virginia, and a graduate of the University of Virginia in 1858. After three years in the German universities, he returned home to engage, on the Confederate side, in the Civil War, serving as engineer on the staff of Gen. Stuart. After the war he was for twelve years Professor of English in Randolph-Macon College and for six years held the Chair of Greek in the University of Virginia, whence he came to Columbia. It was while he was at Randolph Macon College that he began the work which secured him the call to Columbia, and was, in a sense, his life-work, the establishment of the study of English as a study worthy to rank with Greek and Latin. In these latter, as well as in Hebrew, he was a ripe scholar and a successful teacher, and he had made himself a master of six or more modern languages and literatures, so that he brought to his particular and relatively novel task in English abundant knowledge and recognized authority. Before he came to Columbia his students, started and inspired in their career at Randolph-Macon, were returning from the study of English at Leipzig, and they and their successors were filling chairs throughout the South and the middle West. He was, says his colleague, Prof. Trent, “more than any other man save his own great and fortunately surviving teacher, Prof. Gildersleeve, the source from which the educational renaissance of the South proceeded.” He was truly a great teacher as well as scholar. Besides his extraordinary and lasting service rendered to his stricken section and that rendered to the whole country in his remarkable dealing with the study of English, his pupils and his companions cherish the memory of a kindly, unselfish man of high ideals and great personal charm.

Edward Cary
1904 Century Association Yearbook