Doyle:

I believe you are correct in assuming the political angle. John S. Roane was governor when St Johns' was chartered in 1850, but was gone when John Baker THOMPSON and William Naylor BRONAUGH were hired summer of 1859, both graduates of University of Virginia, friends and fellow professors at Albermarle Female Institution in Virginia, state where Roane was born seventeen years before either of them.

They had to have some good reason to travel from St Johns'(next door to U S Arsenal) in Little Rock to Pine Bluff to enlist in the army after only twenty months living in Arkansas, busy starting a college with fifty students. Thompson was elected Major.