Mark Hopkins, drawn on the left here, was an educator at Williams College. One of his students was future president James Garfield, on the right.

There is a saying ascribed to Garfield that an ideal college is "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." The original comment used "log cabin," but the log version, re-told by U.S. Senator John Ingalls (Kansas) became the popular expression. Ingalls and Garfield were Williams College contemporaries.

That quote came to pass at an 1871 dinner in Hopkins' honor. And some correspondence school was still trading on the imagery seven decades later. Remarkable.

That'd be like someone today using a quote Harry Truman uttered about a teacher he had in a Kansas City business or law school class.

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