William P. Price: Professional Con Artist, Founder of the University of North Georgia

BySergio

William P. Price is the founder of the University of North Georgia, then called North Georgia Agricultural College. He has long been considered for his service to education to the North Georgia area, but his actual service record has been more checkered than originally let on.

Photograph of William P. Price
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Price served on the Georgia House of Representatives Committee on Education in the years following the ratification of the 1877 Georgia Constitution adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War and Georgia’s readmission to the Union which sparked an election.

The new state constitution “provided that there should be a thorough system of common schools” at the state level, but that segregation of “the white and colored races” was required at these institutions — something absent from the previous state constitution.1 Price is noted as being influential to the addition of this requirement in the state’s new schooling system.

“He was responsible for the two provisions ‘that the Bible shall not be excluded from the public schools of the State’ and ‘that children of the white and colored races shall not be taught together in any sub-district.'”2

Biography of William Price

After his service in the Georgia state legislature, Price was selected to serve in the 42nd Congress as a U.S. Representative of the Sixth District of Georgia. With the unused U.S. Mint building in Dahlonega, Price sought to use the land for his vision of “bringin social and political order out of the chaotic conditions which followed the war.”3 To achieve funding for this, he had to assert that denizens of North Georgia “were as a class, loyal to the Union during the Civil War, that, in the main, they were of the purest Revolutionary stock, and that it was largely for the purpose of educating the children of these mountaineers” that North Georgia needed a college.4 This was largely false, Price himself being a confederate soldier and would, in one of the two speeches of his final term in Congress, would champion the Southern cause.5 In 1904, Price would donate a bronze replication of the seal of the CSA, with locals calling Price “an enthusiastic veteran of the lost cause, and loses no opportunity to preserve its traditions.”6

Historical revisionism and its public consumption were essential to Price’s plans.

  1. Albert Berry Saye, A Constitutional History of Georgia, 1732-1945 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 288. ↩︎
  2. G.R. Glenn, “William Pierce Price,” in Men of Mark in Georgia, vol. 4, ed. William J. Northen (Atlanta, GA: A.B. Caldwell, 1908), 125. ↩︎
  3. Glenn, 125-126. ↩︎
  4. Lucian Lamar Knight, Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends (Atlanta, GA: The Byrd Printing Company, 1913), 756. ↩︎
  5. Glenn, 127. ↩︎
  6. “Gift to the College,” Dahlonega Nugget (Dahlonega, GA), Oct. 13, 1904. ↩︎

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