Cordell Hull
After Cordell Hull won a debate contest, his father decided to send him to the best school he could afford. This was Montvale Institute in Celina, the county seat of Clay County. This is Hull’s account of his education there when he was 14 years old.
At Montvale I studied algebra, geometry and trigonometry, a little surveying, advanced English, rhetoric (debate), Latin, Greek, and German. The surveying was to come in handy in later years when, as a lawyer or judge, I had to handle or decide cases involving land boundaries….From the age of twelve I could answer any question in the United States history textbook, footnotes and all…
I reveled in biographies of the great philosophers, military commanders, teachers, statesmen, and orators of the ancient world. Some of us devoted most of our time to such reading, dwelling long on the epochal events of Egypt and Greece, Macedonia and Rome, coming on down to the Middle Ages with their Magna Carta, and then into the marvelous Renaissance. The Bible furnished us our early history…I vividly recall reading and rereading Aesop’s Fables, which contain a fund of good, sound sense.
At Celina [while attending school] my brothers Ress and Nade, I and another student, Andrew Taylor,…rented a two-room house. We did our own housekeeping, taking turn at cooking. At the week end some of us brothers often walked the twelve miles to Father’s house to spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday with him and Mother, and walked back again on Sunday evening.
To do so [go home] we had to cross the Obed River. Generally this was not too difficult if we could find a boat on the right side of the river. But sometimes there was not a boat on the right side and we would go hollering up and down the river until we found one.
After one term at Montvale, Hull and his brother Ress went to a boarding school in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Excerpt from The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, Vol. I, by Cordell Hull, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1948)Confronting the Modern Era >> Life in Tennessee >> Making Life Better >> Better Schools
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