Joseph Dupuy Eggleston (13 November 1867–13 March 1953), state superintendent of public instruction and president of Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute (later Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) and of Hampden-Sydney College, was born in Prince Edward County and was the son of Joseph Dupuy Eggleston, a physician, and Anne Carrington Booker Eggleston. He attended Prince Edward Academy, where his father served as president of the board of trustees, and then matriculated at nearby Hampden-Sydney College, where his family connections dated from the institution's founding. Though his academic record was undistinguished, Eggleston received a B.A. in 1886 and an M.A. the following year. He began teaching at Prince Edward Academy and held several other positions before 1893, when he became superintendent of schools in Asheville, North Carolina. During his nine years in Asheville, he participated in the growing movement for universal education in the South.

On 18 December 1895 Eggleston married Julia Jane Johnson, of Farmville. They had one son and one daughter. His and his wife's ancestors included both Huguenot and English residents of seventeenth-century Virginia, which fed his passion for genealogical research. Eggleston moved back to Virginia in 1900 and for two years worked as an editor at a textbook-publishing company in Richmond. He then accepted an invitation from a fellow Hampden-Sydney alumnus, Charles William Dabney, a pioneer leader of the Southern Education Board, to become secretary and editor of the board's Bureau of Information and Advice on Legislation and School Organization, at the University of Tennessee. In 1903 Eggleston returned to Prince Edward County as superintendent of schools. He joined a small group that in 1904 formed the Co-Operative Education Association of Virginia, essentially the Virginia arm of the Southern Education Board. The association secured considerable support from prominent citizens for its May Campaign of 1905, which procured resources for improving public education.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction
By then widely known throughout the state by virtue of his many writings and speeches and with endorsements from other reformers, Eggleston handily won the Democratic Party nomination in 1905 for state superintendent of public instruction and was elected with the education-minded candidate for governor, Claude Augustus Swanson. In February 1906 Eggleston began earnestly pursuing an agenda for overhauling Virginia's school system. During the next seven years the State Board of Education policies that he supported and legislation that he promoted established, in spite of some surprising grass-roots resistance, a comprehensively modern statewide system of public education. Eggleston gave full attention to rural needs in an innovative program of extension and demonstration work. Throughout his adult life, he spoke frequently and wrote numerous articles for newspapers and educational journals on a wide variety of topics, many of them about improvement of rural schools and extension programs. He was the lead co-author of a book on the subject, The Work of the Rural School (1913).

Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute President
Reelected state superintendent in 1909, Eggleston resigned effective 31 December 1912 to become chief of field service in rural education for the United States Bureau of Education. On 13 March 1913 he was elected president of Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute and on 1 July assumed office. In his first month Eggleston began basic changes by creating the post of dean of the general faculty. He emphasized the importance of agricultural extension work to improving the life of rural Virginians and strongly supported legislation that the General Assembly passed in 1914 to consolidate all of the state's extension and cooperative demonstration work at the college. Eggleston set out to cultivate alumni and student support with such popular innovations as special trains to convey alumni to expanded commencement ceremonies beginning in 1914 and, as the first element of a grand campus-refurbishment plan, the construction in 1916 and 1917 of McBryde Hall, the first of the stone buildings for which the campus became famous. The controversy surrounding the building's construction generated strong opposition in the General Assembly to other capital projects.

The institute's financial situation grew desperate during the severe winter of 1917–1918, and inflation during World War I and rebuffs in the assembly reduced the college's available revenue. Moreover, the emergency military arrangements involving the traditional cadet corps, the federal Student Army Training Corps, and the Reserve Officers' Training Corps disrupted academic operations. By spring 1919 an influenza pandemic had hit, the faculty was aflame with discontent, and student behavior was out of hand. Eggleston, despite a public posture of optimism, became discouraged and ready to heed a new call, to return to and rescue Hampden-Sydney College. At his last commencement in Blacksburg on 2 July 1919, Eggleston was showered with gifts and praise. Virginia Tech later named a residence hall in his honor. Eggleston received honorary doctorates from Washington and Lee University in 1917 and from Hampden-Sydney College in 1918.

Hampden-Sydney College President
A complex series of negotiations during the second half of 1918 had vested the charter of the moribund Hampden-Sydney College in the Presbyterian Synod of Virginia, of which Eggleston was a member. On 19 December the college's board elected Eggleston president, and he announced disingenuously, "I have been drafted… and will not plead exemption." He was only the third president of Hampden-Sydney who was not a Presbyterian clergyman. Eggleston took office early in July 1919. The electrification of most of the campus within months symbolized his innovative—and ultimately expensive—program of improvement. Eggleston forthwith converted a residence into the college's first administration building, appointed its first full-time business manager, and named the first part-time dean. New York architects whom he selected soon presented a visionary master plan that included more construction to serve an ambitiously projected 460 students and 20 faculty members.

Financial realities thwarted some of Eggleston's dreams. Although he regarded the synod's early and repeated failures to honor its financial commitments as personal betrayals, by 1922 he had garnered enough outside help, some from the General Education Board, to put up a splendid new science building. In 1926 Eggleston tried to mitigate the grim budgetary situation with a showy sesquicentennial celebration, which resulted in a revived and strengthened alumni association, a regular alumni magazine, and an alumni director. It also spawned plans for a million-dollar fund-raising campaign, launched less than a year before the stock market crash of 1929. Compared with many other colleges, Hampden-Sydney prospered during the Great Depression, thanks largely to remarkably low tuition and favorable national publicity in 1930 on the success of its graduates. Enrollment increased almost every year during Eggleston's administration and in the 1935–1936 academic year reached 349.

Eggleston faced harsh criticism from the board and from alumni, mostly as a result of the synod connection, the amount of time he spent on his private studies, and his outspoken fundamentalist religious views. Under pressure he submitted a letter of resignation on 17 July 1935 but agreed to remain until a successor could be installed. That autumn Eggleston confounded his detractors by demonstrating the worth of his genealogical research. He had tracked down Samuel P. Morton Jr., of Baltimore, a millionaire descendant of one of the college's founding trustees, who was delighted to honor his ancestor's memory with the unprecedented gift of almost $80,000 to pay for a flagship classroom building, Morton Hall, completed by 1937. Nevertheless, by 1938 festering discontents had combined with the mandatory retirement age of seventy to make the end inevitable, and Eggleston agreed to relinquish his office. In June 1939 at his final board meeting he spoke of remarkable successes. Although the college had $1 million in assets and applicants for admission had to be turned away, a $10,000 deficit loomed. Some of Eggleston's disappointments, such as his inability to secure a professional librarian and courses in fine arts, were redressed under his successors, but others, such as required physical education and courses in agriculture, were not.

Later Years
In 1940 Eggleston and his family moved to Green Level, a house that the college's board provided for him. He immersed himself further in his studies, the affairs of the Virginia Historical Society, of which he served as president from 1938 to 1943, and the work of the State Board of Education, on which he sat in 1942 and 1943. Joseph Dupuy Eggleston died at his home in Hampden-Sydney on 13 March 1953 and was buried in the cemetery of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, halfway between Green Level and Penshurst, his home while president. In 1961 the college named its new library for him and later renovated it for academic use.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Makers of America: Biographies of Leading Men of Thought and Action (1915–1917), 1:236–240, Bulletin of Hampden-Sidney College 14 (Apr. 1919): 7–9 (quotation), Virginia Journal of Education 32 (1939): 296–298, Edward Overton Franklin, "A Study of the Life and Work of Joseph Dupuy Eggleston, Junior" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1943), and National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1891–1984), 42:550–551; Birth Register, Prince Edward Co. (month and year only), Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Prince Edward Co. Marriage License; Eggleston Family Papers (1788–1975), Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; Records of Joseph Dupuy Eggleston, Record Group 2/7, Special Collections and University Archives, Carol M. Newman Library, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg; Eggleston, "A Personal Bibliography of the Writings of Dr. J. D. Eggleston" (typescript, 1940s), Walter M. Bortz III Library, Hampden-Sydney College, Farmville; Farmville Herald, 21 Dec. 1895; Duncan Lyle Kinnear, The First 100 Years: A History of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1972), 219–252; Peter Wallenstein, Virginia Tech, Land-Grant University, 1872–1997: History of a School, a State, a Nation (1997), 109–116; John Luster Brinkley, On This Hill: A Narrative History of Hampden-Sydney College, 1774–1994 (1994), esp. 573–674 (portrait on 570); obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times Dispatch, both 14 Mar. 1953, and Farmville Herald and Farmer-Leader, 17 Mar. 1953; editorial tributes in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 15 Mar. 1953, Farmville Herald and Farmer-Leader, 17 Mar. 1953, and Record of the Hampden-Sydney Alumni Association 27 (Apr. 1953): 1–2, 10–11.

Photograph in E. A. Smyth, "Brief History of the Agricultural and Mechancial College and Polytechnic Institute, 1872–1922," Bulletin of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 15 (May 1922).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John Luster Brinkley.

How to cite this page:
John Luster Brinkley, "Joseph Dupuy Eggleston (1867–1953)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Eggleston_Joseph_Dupuy, accessed [today's date]).

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