William Peterfield Trent, Sr.

William Peterfield Trent, Sr.

• Find A Grave Memorial ID # 228540556
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Peterfield_Trent

Professor Trent was born in Richmond, Virginia on November 10, 1862. His paternal ancestors had been substantial citizens of the Old Dominion since colonial days. As landholders, tobacco planters, merchants, and doctors, they had prospered until the Civil War destroyed the family competence. Joseph Trent, William's grandfather, received the M.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania; Peterfield Trent, his father, graduated in medicine at the University of Georgia, enjoyed a lucrative practice in the last antebellum decade, and sacrificed his fortune to the Confederate cause while serving as a surgeon. Trent's mother, nee Lucy Carter Burwell, counted prominent Virginians among her ancestors.

With adequate preparation at Thomas Norwood's University School in Richmond, Trent entered the University of Virginia in the fall of 1880. He studied ancient and modern languages, history and moral philosophy, chemistry and mathematics, natural history and geology, numbering among his teachers George F. Holmes, Charles S. Venable, and William M. Fontaine, and among fellow students Woodrow Wilson, Richard H. Dabney, and Oscar W. Underwood. Before graduating in 1883 with the bachelor of letters degree, he had served first as assistant editor and then as editor in chief of the Virginia University Magazine, and had acquired considerable reputation as a literary critic.

Another year at the University yielded further study of history, mathematics, and science, and the degree of master of arts. The years from 1884 to 1887 were devoted to teaching in Richmond schools and to reading law.

In the fall of 1887 Trent entered Johns Hopkins University for advanced graduate study, attracted there, as were so many scholar from the South, by the enviable reputation of Herbert B. Adams as an impartial teacher of history and politics and as a sympathetic and inspiring director of graduate study. Courses in finance with Richard T. Ely, historical jurisprudence with George H. Emmett, administration with Woodrow Wilson, and American history with J. Franklin Jameson supplemented Trent's work in ancient politics and Russian history with Adams. He was also a member of the Seminary of Historical and Political Science, directed by Adams but embracing other members of the departmental faculty.

Trent performed before the Seminary on at least three occasions. His report on "The Influence of the University of Virginia on Southern Life & Thought" received Adams' commendation, especially for its statistical tables indicating fields of activity entered by more than nine thousand graduates and former students in the half century from 1825 to 1874.3 This study was honored by inclusion as a chapter in Adams' Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (1888), to which Trent also contributed a bibliography of publications by the University of Virginia faculty, 1825-1887.

William P. Trent as a Historian of the South by Wendell H. Stephenson, May 1949, Vol 15, No. 2