Maryville College launches Sawtell Wagon Trail challenge to commemorate 200th anniversary of the first graduating class
March 27, 2025
It’s not a landmark, nor is it found on any topographical map, but the Sawtell Wagon Trail will nevertheless serve as an inspiration for Maryville College Scots to pay homage to the institution’s first graduating class.
In 1825, six years after Rev. Isaac Anderson established what was known then as the Southern and Western Theological Seminary, six men were officially presented to the local Presbytery for licensing and ordination. And one of them — Eli Newton Sawtell (1799-1885) — overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to receive his Maryville College education. That determination, said Jennifer Phillips Triplett ’07, director of Alumni Affairs at MC, serves as the motivation for the Sawtell Wagon Trail: A Race to Commencement, an event open to alumni, faculty, staff, current students and College supporters alike.
“Eli walked approximately 1,100 miles on the Great Wagon Road, from New Hampshire to Maryville, to begin his education at the seminary,” Triplett said. “He was one of the first students when it opened in 1819 and then one of the first graduates in 1825. We are challenging all members of the MC community to come together to complete the same (or more!) number of miles in honor of Eli and the 200th anniversary of graduates from our beloved institution.
“Those are our very first alums! The Sawtell Wagon Trail is in honor and celebration of the commitment to higher education of those first alumni, and all who seek out this institution.”
A legacy of dedication
Born in the New Hampshire village of Hollis, Sawtell first learned about the institution that would become Maryville College through the Rev. Eli Smith, an East Tennessee minister whose father was the pastor of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Hollis. Before Smith set out to visit his father, Anderson beseeched him to seek out and bring back “at least one-half dozen New England boys to study and become ministers in Tennessee, in view of the great need of ministers then so sorely felt at the Southwest,” wrote the Rev. John Edminston Alexander in the 1890 book A Brief History of the Synod of Tennessee, From 1817 to 1887.
Smith’s entreaties won over several young men in Hollis, Alexander continued, including Sawtell, who arranged for release from his three-year pledge to work as a shoemaker’s apprentice. When the time came to depart for Maryville, however, Sawtell was the only one to follow through.
“When the parents had considered the dangers — the wild beasts, savages, mountains, forests, rivers and distance of 1,100 miles — then the tears of the mothers detained them all but one, and his mother did not wish to detain him,” Alexander wrote.
Packing “my Bible, hymn book and Baxter’s ‘Saint Rest,’ and all my earthly goods packed in a cotton handkerchief, a hickory cane whittled out in my hand, and $14 in my pocket, I started, May 9, 1818, on foot and alone for Tennessee,” Sawtell would later recall. He arrived at the end of June of that year, and Anderson notes that “Dr. Anderson first received and treated him as a son in his own home.” It would be another year before the seminary officially opened, but upon Sawtell’s licensing and ordination, he became a steadfast advocate for his alma mater as a “College Agent,” traveling through West Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and down to New Orleans to “collect money for Dr. Anderson’s infant and struggling seminary.”
His travels were fortuitous and fruitful, but it’s that initial journey, Triplett said, that inspired the idea behind the Sawtell Wagon Trail.
“I learned about Eli and his story from our archivist, Amy Lundell ’06, who is a wealth of knowledge about the College and its history,” Triplett said. “We were discussing upcoming College milestones and anniversaries for the 2024 Homecoming Archives Exhibit. Amy mentioned that after celebrating the College’s bicentennial in 2019, we were now approaching the 200th anniversary of the first graduates in 2025, and one of those graduates had actually walked across the country to study with Isaac Anderson.
“After hearing about Eli’s story, I reached out to our Mountain Challenge and Fit.Green.Happy.® teams, as it seemed like a great opportunity to collaborate on engagement with the greater College community, including alumni, by creating some sort of challenge honoring Eli’s walk and the first graduating class to foster community through a shared experience.”
Fostering fitness and community
For Tyson Murphy ’03, director of Mountain Challenge — MC’s on-campus partner where students and members of the public connect with one another through team-building exercises and outdoor adventures — the resiliency demonstrated by Sawtell to get to Maryville College aligns ideally with the mission of his organization.
“The thing that sticks out to me was just how hard it was for him just to get here to Maryville College,” Murphy said. “One of the ideas we stress is that there’s value in doing hard things that are mentally and physically difficult, and how those hard things can make the next hard thing more manageable or tolerable. We use words like grit and resilience, and those are traits Eli Sawtell obviously possessed. No doubt he was healthy if he could walk that great a distance, and what we find is that healthy students are happier students … and healthier and happier students have higher GPAs and higher retention rates.”
Designed as a challenge, the event encourages participants to take part in accumulating 1,100 miles in Sawtell’s honor. It begins in April and lasts through Commencement, which takes place May 3, 2025, on the MC campus, and participants are invited to keep track of the distances they walk or run in various 5K races or marathons for other causes and nonprofits. Alumni are also “encouraged to create a walk or run specifically tied to the anniversary of the first graduating class, or they can simply keep track of the miles they log on regular afternoon strolls or jogs through the neighborhoods in which they live,” Triplett said.
The challenge, stressed Jackie Eul ’18, program director for the health initiative Fit.Green.Happy.®, isn’t limited to regular runners or athletes: Part of the goal is to encourage participants to embrace her organization’s advocacy that “outdoors is medicine,” and to log their miles by getting outside and walking, jogging or running during the month of April.
“An online form will collect miles — however they are completed — along with stories and photos to share about participants’ run/walk experiences,” Eul said. “We hope that participants will log and submit however they may walk or run — whether that is a lunch break walk in the Maryville College Woods or a planned city marathon during the month of April.
“We encourage anyone who wishes to go a step further and complete their miles at special locations — like on a mountain trail reminiscent of an alum’s time at MC in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, or even a few miles along the former path of the Great Wagon Road! We know that there are alumni living in many areas of that former route, and we would love to see Eli’s walk represented in such a special way.”
Event organizers plan to promote the various means through which the 1,100 miles are accumulated on social media, and the final mile(s) will be tallied from the steps every graduate in the Class of 2025 takes during the Commencement processional on May 3, when seniors walk from the Clayton Center for the Arts to the Commencement site in Humphreys Court, located between Anderson and Fayerweather Halls. On the Sawtell Wagon Trail web page, participants can upload photos of their participation, Triplett said, to help tell the story of connection to that first graduating class.
“As part of our brainstorming sessions, we talked about how meaningful would it be if the Class of 2025 marked the final mile as they prepare to become alumni of this institution,” Triplett said. “They have journeyed through joys and difficulties to complete their degrees at Maryville, just like all of our graduates since 1825. They are the throughline from that first class to the present.
“The goal for this event is to engage with the MC community, whether they are on campus every day or haven’t stepped foot here since graduation, in a common purpose and experience that also celebrates an important milestone for the institution: 200 years of graduates! I hope we will reconnect with alumni, create a fun way to share a photo and story, and reach our goal of 1100 miles.”