IV. Schools and Departments
When the session of 1860–61 opened, there was a band
of thirteen professors ready to discharge the duties of
their several chairs. Coleman and Holcombe, as we
have already mentioned, resigned their posts to enter,—
one, the military service of the Confederacy, in which he
was to lose his life; the other, its civil service. Gildersleeve,
when Coleman withdrew, took charge of the consolidated
schools of ancient languages, and Minor, of
the two departments of the subdivided school of law.
Bledsoe, with the Visitors' permission, accepted the office
of assistant secretary of war. He returned to the
University for a brief period; but during the greater
part of the time that hostilities continued, the courses
formerly taught by him were taught by Smith, who combined
them with the courses of his own professorship.
In June, 1865,—Bledsoe being then absent from Virginia,
—the Board declared the chair of mathematics to
be vacant, and they elected Colonel Charles S. Venable
to fill it. Subsequently, Colonel William E. Peters was
chosen as the successor of Gessner Harrison and Coleman,
which led to the reestablishment of the separate
School of Latin,—Gildersleeve retaining the School of
Greek. S. O. Southall succeeded Holcombe, and the
two departments in the School of Law were revived.
But the Board were not satisfied simply to restore the
original number of chairs. In 1867, two new schools
were created,—one, the School of Applied Mathematics,
embracing the different courses in engineering; the other,
the School of Analytical and Applied Chemistry, covering
the different applications of that science to the various
industrial pursuits of life. During the same year, a
laboratory of analytical chemistry, and a museum of industrial,
were built. Through the munificence of Samuel
Miller, a wealthy merchant of Lynchburg, a School of
Agriculture was added in 1869;[2]
and through the similar
generosity of W. W. Corcoran, a School of Geology,
in 1879–80. A museum of natural history was presented
by Lewis Brooks. At a later period, a sum sufficient
to erect an observatory was received from Leander J.
McCormick; and through his gift also, a great equatorial
telescope was acquired. A School of English was
established in the course of the same year.
By 1895, the end of the Seventh Period, the number
of academical schools,—which had been curtailed to
eight in 1865,—had expanded to fourteen. At first,
the entire round of them was divided into the four great
departments of literature, science, medicine, and law.
Subsequently, a different grouping was adopted. There
were then the following five great departments; the
academic, subdivided into literary schools and scientific
schools; the medical; the law; the engineering; and the
agricultural. The entire number of departments now
comprised nineteen schools. In 1882–3, a somewhat
different arrangement was introduced,—there were then
created two fundamental divisions: (1) the academical
schools, composed of the literary department and the
scientific department; (2) the professional schools, composed
of the law department, the medical department,
the pharmaceutical department, the engineering department,
and the agricultural department. This grouping
seems to have been retained without modification down
to the beginning of the Eighth Period in 1895. It will
now be necessary to consider at length the lines of development
which the different schools pursued during the
thirty years that followed the session of 1865–66.
