Page:Men of Mark in America vol 1.djvu/345



ROWELL, JOHN FRANKLIN, Ph.D., Litt.D., teacher, economist and author, was born at York, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1857 His parents were Daniel and Sarah Ann (Jacobs) Crowell, respectively of English and German descent. Among their ancestors were pioneer settlers in southern Pennsylvania, several of whom served in the War of the Revolution. His father, a miller and farmer, was a man of high character and strong, yet tolerant, religious convictions.

Most of his preparation for college was made by study at home. To the encouragement which his mother gave to his early literary ambition, and his father to his efforts to "think clear and straight," he ascribes much of such success as he has achieved. When he was five years old his parents removed to a farm, "to keep their boys from growing up in idleness"; and Professor Crowell places a high value upon this farm-life in his boyhood. "The free farm-life, with a few good books, was my best training school," he says. Books which he names as among the most helpful to him, are "Peter Parley's" histories, "Pilgrim's Progress," American biographical works; and later in life, Emerson, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Goethe, the "Iliad," Thucydides, "Science and Health," and the Bible.

After preparing for college at home, he taught school for a time; and from his savings at farm-work and in teaching, with the help of loans from his parents, be was enabled to secure a collegiate education. After a year of study at Dartmouth college and a year spent in teaching, he entered the Sophomore class at Yale and was graduated in 1883. Another year of teaching as principal of Schuylkill seminary, at Reading, Pennsylvania, was followed by two years of post-graduate study at Yale. From 1887 to 1894 he was president of Trinity college. North Carolina, where he endeavored to bring the higher educational institutions of the state into closer relations with leading problems of Southern progress. In 1889 the University of North Carolina gave him the degree of Litt.D. Returning to the