Emory and Henry University

You are at the far southwestern tip of Virginia, in the fold of mountains where the state borders both Tennessee and Kentucky, and in this remote but storied corner sits Emory and Henry University, the oldest institution of higher learning in all of southwest Virginia. The Methodist Holston Conference voted to found it in October of eighteen thirty-five. The cornerstone went down the following September. Classes began in the spring of eighteen thirty-eight.

The college is named for two men. John Emory was a Methodist bishop who died before the school opened. Patrick Henry was Virginia's first governor and the patriot orator who declared he knew not what course others might take. The dual naming reflects the college's dual identity: religious mission and civic purpose, education for a region that was still very much a frontier.

For over a century Emory and Henry trained the ministers, lawyers, politicians, and doctors of Appalachian Virginia. Two Virginia governors graduated here: Henry Carter Stuart, class of eighteen seventy-four, and George Peery, class of eighteen ninety-four. But the most consequential alumnus in terms of American national security may be someone most people have never heard of.

Frank Rowlett graduated in nineteen twenty-nine and went to work for the Army's Signal Intelligence Service the following year. In nineteen forty he led the team that cracked Japan's most sophisticated diplomatic cipher, a machine the Americans codenamed PURPLE. The intelligence flowing from that breakthrough, called Magic, gave American commanders advance warning of Japanese diplomatic intentions and is credited with saving thousands of Allied lives. Rowlett also co-designed SIGABA, the American cipher machine that protected high-level military communications throughout the war. The Germans never broke it. President Lyndon Johnson awarded him the National Security Medal in nineteen sixty-five, and the NSA inducted him posthumously into its Hall of Honor in nineteen ninety-nine.

Not bad for a math teacher's son from southwest Virginia.