Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/238

198 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS As Providence would have it, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, youngest of seven sons and three daugh ters, was marked to be the scholar of the family. Trained by his parents, and especially by his mother, who was a Presbyterian of the "straitest sect," it was not surprising that he turned to the Gospel ministry as his calling. The stair steps in his education were the Steubenville Academy ; Jef ferson College, afterwards Washington and Jef ferson College, where he took first honors; and a year each at Western Theological Seminary at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and Princeton Seminary. The Reverend Doctor Thomas Woodrow, Eng lish-descended but Scotch-born, some years before had left his church at Carlisle, England, to become a missionary in the New World, and had finally come to Chillicothe, Ohio. It came about that he sent his pretty and sprightly daughter, Janet, sometimes called Jessie, to the girls school at Steu benville at the same time that Joseph R. Wilson had returned to that place to teach for a couple of years in the male academy. Finding their tastes con genial and their ideals alike, these two were happily married on June 7, 1849, and after teaching rhetoric for a year at Jefferson College, and chem istry and the natural sciences for four years at Hampden Sidney College, Virginia, the young husband accepted a call to the pastorate of the Presbyterian church at Staunton, Virginia, in the