Seminary Of Learning, Alexandria, Nov. 25, 1859.
I am still out here at the Seminary, pushing on the work as
fast as possible, but people don't work hard down here. The weather has been
warm and springlike, but tonight the wind is piping and betokens rain. This is
Friday. I have been writing all week, the regulations, and have been sending off
circulars - indeed everything is backward, and it will keep us moving to be
ready for cadets January 1. The Board of Supervisors are to meet on Monday, and
I will submit to them the regulations and lists of articles indispensably
necessary, and I suppose I will be sent to New Orleans to make the purchases.
The planters about Alexandria are rich but the town is a
poor concern. Nothing like furniture can be had. Everybody orders from New
Orleans. General Graham is at his plantation nine miles from Alexandria and
twelve from here. I get a note from him every day urging me to assume all
responsibility as he and all the supervisors are busy at their cotton or sugar.
I believe I have fully described the locality and the fact
that although the building for the Seminary is in itself very fine, yet it is
solitary and alone in the country and in no wise suited for families. Of course
I will permit no family to live in the building. There happens to be one house
about one-fourth mile to the rear, belonging to one McCoy in New Orleans, but
that is rented by Mr. Vallas, the professor of mathematics, who now occupies it
with his family, wife and seven children. They are Hungarians and he is an
Episcopal Clergyman, but his religion don't hurt him much. He seems a pleasant
enough man, fifty years old, fat, easy and comfortable. . . They have an
Irishman and wife as servants and have plenty of complaints. The house is leaky
and full of holes, so that they can hardly keep a candle burning when the wind
is boisterous. Indeed the house was built for summer use and calculated to
catch as much wind as possible. The design is to ask the legislature to
appropriate for two professors' houses for Vallas and ourselves.
If they appropriate I will have the building and will of
course see to their comfort, but I will make no calculations until the amount
is settled on. I fear the cost of the building will deter the legislature from
appropriating until the institution begins to make friends.
The new governor, Moore, lives near Alexandria and will be
highly favorable to liberal appropriation. We have fine springs of pure water
all round, and I doubt not the place is very healthy. Indeed there is nothing
to make it otherwise unless the long hot summers create disease. I am now
comparatively free of my cough and am in about usual condition - have to burn
nitre paper occasionally. It is very lonely here indeed. Nobody to talk to but
the carpenters and sitting here alone in this great big house away out in the
pine wood is not cheerful. . .
SOURCES: The article is abstracted in Walter L.
Fleming’s, General W.T. Sherman as College President, p. 60-1
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