page_title: Gessner Harrison
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Gessner Harrison / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Harrison Hall, named for Dr. Gessner Harrison
context_page_description: Gessner Harrison was an American educator, author, and college administrator during the antebellum era. He was appointed by James Madison as an associate professor of ancient languages at the University of Virginia. Harrison was recognized for teaching the fundamentals of the classics as well as linguistics, and for advancing these in his publications. He often served as chairman of the faculty and was required to address years of riotous student behavior.
  Harrison entered the university as an undergraduate in its initial year of operation. He had been raised as a staunch Christian, and while his devotion invited the reproval of many classmates, it once occasioned a compliment from the university's founder, Thomas Jefferson. He excelled academically and graduated with doctorates in Medicine and Ancient Languages; his classmates included Edgar Allan Poe. In 1828 he became the first alumnus to join the faculty there, at age twenty-one.
  Harrison's work in comparative grammar, articulated in his text Exposition of Latin Grammar, was on a par with scholarly leaders at German and English schools. He served as chairman of the university faculty for over a third of his thirty-year tenure.
context_section_description: Rev. John A. Broadus remarked, in an address memorializing Harrison a decade afterwards, that the loss occasioned by the death of Harrison was overshadowed by the chaos of the American Civil War:
  He fell amid the storm of war. Three years earlier and the death of Gessner Harrison would have stirred the entire South. The journals of every state would have included tributes from many an admiring and grateful pupil...And so it is likely that the young of today can scarcely believe, the old can with little difficulty recall, how widely known and how highly honored and admired, how warmly loved, was this mere civilian, the quiet and unpretending professor of 1859. 
  Historian William F. Boogher has also said the following of Harrison:
  
   
  He was perhaps the most important figure in the educational history of the Southern States in the period before the Civil War.
  Univ. of Va. Chapel features a pair of stained glass windows (height-13 ft.) which are dedicated to him.
  Harrison Hall, a former dormitory at the university, was named for him.
  Harrison Hall, an academic building at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, is also named in his memory.
caption: Harrison Hall, James Madison Univ.
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