SUMMARY Gessner Harrison was a professor of ancient languages at the University of Virginia from 1828 to 1859, the first graduate of the university to join the faculty. Born in Harrisonburg, he hailed from a learned and political family, and, in 1825, became the fifth student to register at the new University of Virginia. Harrison’s sincerity and religious conviction appeared to have impressed Thomas Jefferson, with whom he was invited to dine, and he became a professor when he was just twenty-one years old. What impressed Jefferson, however, did not always impress his students who, early in Harrison’s career, attacked him on multiple occasions, once with a horsewhip. Harrison, who had earned a degree in medicine, eventually came to earn respect as a classics scholar, and he served as faculty chairman three times (1837–1839, 1840–1842, 1847–1854). In 1859, he resigned from the university to establish a school for boys. The beginning of the American Civil War (1861–1865) took most of his students away and the school closed when Harrison died in 1862.