Kentucky: A History of the State, Battle, Perrin, & Kniffin, 4th ed., 
1887, Boyle Co.

ORMOND BEATTY, LL. D. In a history of Kentucky meant, in part at least,
to contain notices or sketches of her distinguished and useful men, it 
would leave a blank which would astonish many, and be an injustice to a 
very learned and able man, to omit from its pages the name of President 
Beatty, a native of the State, well born and well raised, and who, from 
boyhood to old age , has been a beloved and honored teacher in her 
foremost institution of learning, the presidency of which he has 
recently resigned, at seventy-one years of age, on account of failing 
health. To make good the foregoing intimations in this attempted sketch 
will fill up the space allotted to the writer. The name of Beatty seems 
to indicate that the family were Scotch people; and one of the 
descendants of a late generation, whilst traveling in Scotland, 
ascertained that they were so and that the name, after the Scotch 
fashion, was originally spelled Beattie. Those of them who first came 
to America settled in New York at Esopus, a point on the Hudson. About 
the year 1730, one of them, William Beatty, became a citizen of 
Frederick County, Md., where he owned land on which he settled and 
resided until his death. His son, William Beatty, Jr., who inherited
the place, was born there on the 17th of January, 1739. In the year 
1743, John Conrad Grosh and his family, German people from Mayence on 
the Rhine, settled five miles away from William Beatty, in 
Fredericktown, his eldest daughter, Mary, being then just four years 
old. In the year 1757, when they were each eighteen years old, these 
two, William Beatty, Jr., and Mary Dorothea Grosh, were married, too 
early, as it seems to the writer on some accounts, for they had sixteen 
children, and raised them all, twelve sons and four daughters. Three of 
the older sons distinguished themselves in the wars with England, and 
handsome notices of them can be found in the histories of the country. 
Young William Beatty, the eldest son of them, held a commission in the 
regular army and was killed in a charge at the head of his regiment, 
about the age of twenty-two, in the second battle of Camden; and Gen. 
Green, who belonged to the Southern Army, said of him, as Chief Justice 
Marshall has recorded with evident pride, in his life of Washington, 
that "he was an ornament to his profession."  The writer heard
some of his letters from the army read by one of his brothers with
streaming eyes sixty years after their dates. Judge Adam Beatty, the
twelfth child of this family, was the father of Dr. Beatty, the subject
of this sketch. He was named after a brother of his mother, Adam Grosh. 
The second sister of Judge Beatty, Sophia, some years older than 
himself, had married Col. Nathaniel Rochester, a merchant of Hagerstown,
Md., who subsequently founded the city of Rochester, N.Y., and left a 
large family there of most exemplary and accomplished sons and 
daughters. Judge Beatty in boyhood was a clerk in his store, having 
first, no doubt, been a helper along with his brothers in the 
cultivation of the farm. It is certain he was at work about something. 
Two elder brothers, Cornelius and Otho, had come to Kentucky and 
settled here, Cornelius at Lexington. Judge Beatty was born on the 10th
of May, 1777, and it must have been when he was about grown that he 
made up his mind to come to Kentucky to study law and try his
fortunes in this new land; and another branch of the family came to
Kentucky at an early day and perhaps added to the allurements which
brought Judge Beatty.  Peter Grosh, the eldest brother of Mrs. Beatty, 
married Mary Charlton, whose children were three daughters and a son. 
They lost their mother before they were grown, and their home after her 
death was mainly the house of their aunt, Mrs. Beatty. The eldest of 
these sisters, Eleanor Grosh, married Thomas Hart of Kentucky.  Sophia,
the next, married Edward Porter Clay, a brother of the great senator.  
The other, Catherine, married John W. Hunt, of Fayette County, and 
their descendants of many names have always been among the foremost 
people of the commonwealth. No doubt accounts from all these went back 
to Maryland and had something to do with the hopes and schemes which 
brought Judge Beatty here, and about the beginning of the century he 
got to Lexington, where he became a clerk in the store of his brother, 
Cornelius, and, at the same time, a law student in the office of Judge 
James Brown.  As early as 1802 he had come to Washington, Mason County, 
and begun the practice of his profession, for there is a letter from 
his mother to him at that place now before the writer, dated May 7, 
1803, and there is other evidence of the same date.  July 2, 1804, he 
was married to Miss Sally Green, eldest daughter of Capt. John Green, 
also a Marylander, who came with his family to Kentucky only a few 
years earlier than Judge Beatty came.  It was in the year 1811, when he
was thirty-four years of age, that he was appointed by Gov. Scott to his
office of circuit judge of the district in which he lived. Soon
afterward he moved to his farm near by, on which most of his children 
were born and where he lived the rest of his long life, a happy, useful,
studious and distinguished man, and, for many of his last years, a 
religious man. His family consisted of five sons, who grew up with 
perhaps the one disadvantage of not having a sister in their midst; but 
they were not without the good influences of female care and 
watchfulness; for surely no family of boys ever owed more to the 
management and training of a mother.  She put no pettish restraints on 
boyish playfulness and she often joined them in their merriment and 
mirth; but somehow or other, without temper and without severity, she 
had a way of keeping them from all manner of misconduct and apparently 
from even an inclination to it.  All the good lessons of innocence and 
purity, of industry and manliness, were taught by mother and father; 
and they were permitted to live to see five noble intellects and 
noble characters of usefulness, influence and distinction developed as 
the result, in good part, no doubt, of those lessons of early life.  It 
was a friendly, cordial, affectionate, hospitable home, where the
best of people from far and near were visitors and friends; and the
writer supposes that not one of those who belonged  to it carried away 
when he left it the recollection of one scene in the family life there 
which deserved reproach.  It was on this farm and at this home, that 
Dr. Beatty, as was said before, was well born and well raised.  He had 
heredity to help him and the environment also of that home and its 
memories, which are no mean aids, it must be admitted, in the case of a 
boy who is making his start; but they are a long distance away from the 
point he has reached, as could be easily shown by a capable pen, 
without exaggeration or the least departure from the honest truth.  He 
was born on the 13th of August, 1815, and is the fourth son in his 
father's family.  His chief preparation for college was at the old 
Franklin Academy in the town of Washington, when Mr. David V. Rannells 
was the teacher, to and from which he used to walk a distance of two 
and a half miles every school day without much concern for weather. 
Riding to school and staying at home in ugly weather had not then
become the fashion.  The way to Centre College in those days was a rough
stage ride on a dirt road, of two days; and the University of Ohio, at
Athens, was more accessible; and the question was the choice between the
two.  There was a young schoolmate, however, who was starting at Athens,
and the two trunks were packed for the latter place. Some mere accident,
it is now forgotten what, perhaps low water in the river, changed the 
arrangement and changed with it every step in Dr. Beatty's subsequent
life, made up of a few years as student and of fifty years as professor 
and president at Centre College. Ten thousand chances and more to one, 
without that accident, that the life of this honored man and most useful
man would have been as little like his actual life, as if he had been a 
different being.  The writer has heard him tell the story with serious 
tone, as if he felt, as another has said, that there is a power above 
ourselves "which shapes our ends."  In 1832 he entered the Freshman 
class in Centre College; but before the session was out he was put in 
the class above, with which he graduated in 1835, his classmates being 
Thomas Walker Fry, William W. Hill, John  Montgomery, William N. Todd 
and Samuel H. Woodson.  Rev. John C. Young had recently been made the 
young president of the college, when there was a lack both of 
professors and students.  It was to aid in supplying the former want, 
that Dr. Young gave notice to Mr. Beatty, during the last year of his 
course, that he had chosen him to join the faculty, when he quit the
class- a repetition of the very thing which happened in the case of his
eldest brother, William Rochester Beatty, in the time of Dr. Holly, at
Transylvania University. Dr. Young's offer, after consultation, was
accepted, though the other was declined.  A born lawyer, in that case,
chose another profession. After spending a year with old Dr. Silliman at
Yale, Dr. Beatty returned to Danville and became professor of chemistry
and natural philosophy. This was in the year 1836, when he was just 
twenty-one years old. Very profound studies, as every student knows, 
belong to that department; but notwithstanding the youth of the teacher,
the student who failed to master them had nobody to blame but himself. 
He kept this place eleven years until 1847, when the professor of 
mathematics resigned and when also they could find a professor of 
chemistry and natural science, but nobody for mathematics, except Dr. 
Beatty, and, accordingly, he was made professor of mathematics; and if 
there was a puzzle in that science, almost the whole of which is a 
puzzle to most men even of ability, which he could not solve, it is the 
belief of the writer that nobody ever found it out. It was this chair 
that he always liked the most.  In 1852 there was a reversal of the 
trouble- a mathematician could then be found and not a man for
chemistry and natural philosophy except, again, Prof. Beatty, and he
took once more his original chair.  This remained his place for the 
next twenty years, when in 1872 he became president and the teacher of 
metaphysics and political science, etc., where nobody discovered 
deficiencies any more than they had been discovered elsewhere in his 
other places.  The truth is, as all his students know, he trod with 
firm step as teacher almost the whole the whole curriculum, just as it 
lay before him in boyhood, when he was only learning the route.  It was 
a good accident which carried Dr. Beatty to Danville- good for himself, 
good for Centre College and for the multitude of students who have been 
educated there in the last fifty years.  His whole life has been a 
placid and happy one, only disturbed by the deaths which have occurred 
in his family.  The college has had his long and useful services and 
the students are wiser and better men on account of his wise 
instruction and friendly counsel, for which they are spreading his
fame all over the land- both by what they are saying in praise of him
and by what, as gentlemen and scholars, they are exhibiting in their 
own lives of the advantages of of education; and it cannot be 
inappropriate to add here expressions about him recently made by two of 
the distinguished alumni of the college.  At the meeting of the alumni 
at Danville, June, 1885, Hon. William O.P. Breckinridge delivered the 
address and said concerning Dr. Beatty: "I am chary of laudation to the 
living or of eulogy to the present, but it would do violence to myself 
and to my brethren, present and absent, if I failed to note that this 
closes the half century since Ormond Beatty received his degree of 
Bachelor of Arts, and in full health, `his eye not dim,' nor `his 
natural force abated,' he fills with conscientious dutifulness and 
singular accuracy the position he has so long and so ably occupied.  
May it be many years before some brother alumnus shall, in the
presence of another assembly, speak of his completed labors and finished
life.  May I be pardoned for saying that such a life in the midst of
such a community, through so many years, given to such labors with such 
success, is a rare fortune- fruitful labors in recurring years brought 
added esteem and accumulated confidence; a life where the sower lived 
to see so many harvests; a career like unto a tropical orange tree, 
where golden fruit, ripening orange and fragrant blossom give the 
reward of toil, the certainty of success and the fair promise of 
abundance.  Such a life and such a career are indeed enviable and are 
only to the laborious, the dutiful and the able."  Dr. Beatty had 
tendered his resignation to the trustees to take effect at the close of 
the session in the summer of 1886, and it had been resolved by a member 
of the alumni. that, at their meeting meeting this summer, some public 
and general expression of their regard for him should be made, but this 
was prevented by severe affliction in his family.  The address, however,
which was meant for the occasion, was delivered by the Hon. John F. 
Phillips of Missouri and a few sentences of it, which are to the point 
here, are as follows:  "There doubtless have been and are men your 
superiors in specialties, but I trust you will take no offense at what
your known modesty may deem excessive laudation, when I speak my honest
convictions in saying, that I much question whether there lives to-day a
man of letters who has exhibited such versatility of learning with so
much completeness in different branches of scholarship as yourself.  
Whether in the laboratory expounding the natural sciences in physics 
and chemistry, or as president, unfolding mental science and 
metaphysics, or in polemics, touching political economy, statecraft, 
the problems of government and current political history, you  have 
adorned every chair and proved a foeman worthy of any man's steel, and,
Doctor, a number of the alumni of Centre College have raised a fund of 
$1,000 for the purpose of constituting `the Ormond Beatty Prize.  One 
object of its creation is to produce among the young who shall 
matriculate at this college a generous rivalry in those noble contests 
where mind meets mind in the struggle for intellectual supremacy. It is 
but a small token of their esteem for you.  It originated in a desire, 
if possible, to connect the more inseparably your name with the most 
pleasing struggles and triumphs of college life.  In the name of its 
generous donors I now commit it to your charge."  Let nobody conclude,
the writer begs, from what has been said or from what has been omitted,
that this wonderfully clear-headed teacher has been the mere reflector
of other men's thoughts. That would be the very opposite of the truth. 
You might strip him of all that he has gotten from other men and there 
would be much more of him left than was taken away. He has always stood 
on his own feet, as much apart from mere authority as any teacher to be 
found, with capacity as great to reject what ought not to be learned as 
to acquire what deserved to be stored away; and, when he became a 
dissenter from authority as he often did, his reasons were given with a 
clearness and force which will never be forgotten by any sensible 
student who heard them.  These traits were most distinctly personal and 
characteristic.  Dr. Beatty has besides remarkable talents as a speaker 
and debater, which have often been felt and acknowledged  by many able 
men who have encountered him in the discussions of almost all 
conceivable subjects of human thought in the famous old club at 
Danville, where the celebrated Joshua F. Bell used to say he "had heard 
speeches from Dr. Beatty, any one of which, if made in the United States
Senate, would have won a national reputation in a single week."  Within 
a few days a very able man, who is a great speaker, himself, and was 
once a member of that club, was heard to say that Dr. Beatty is the
greatest debater he ever heard.  But justice to others, as well as the
truth itself, requires it to be said that to Dr. Young more than any man
besides must the success of Centre College be attributed, and they
require it to be said also that many scholarly and able men beside Dr. 
Beatty, who have been on the faculty from time to time, have contributed
their shares to the work which has been done; and there is one only 
reason why no mention has been made of others, and that is, that this 
is simply an attempted sketch of Dr. Beatty.  In conclusion it should, 
perhaps, be said that the degree of A. M. was given Dr. Beatty by his 
own college in 1847 and the degree of LL.D. by Princeton College, in 
1868, but these at most do not signify much, though it should be 
remembered that the latter came from Princeton; and came, as the writer 
feels sure, unsought, to a man who never sought anything but to do his 
duty. If that can be said of anybody, it can as well be said of Dr. 
Beatty.

Beatty Beattie Grosh Green Marshall Rochester Charlton Hart 
Clay Hunt Brown Scott Rannells Fry Hill Montgomery Todd Woodson 
Young Silliman Breckinridge Phillips Bell
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Fayette-KY Mason-KY NY MD OH MO Scotland

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