Hollis Burke Frissell was born on July 14, 1851, in the village of South Amenia, Dutchess County, New York. He was one of the four children of Rev. Amasa Cogswell and Lavinia (Barker) Frissell.
His descent was from Joseph Frissell, a Scotchman, who was one of thirty-five men to receive grants in Woodstock, Conn. , in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Ancestors on both sides were Revolutionary officers.
Frissell's education began in a little red school-house and was continued in the old academy in Amenia where his mother had taught prior to her marriage, in a military school at College Hill, Poughkeepsie, in Dr. Dwight’s School, New York City, in Phillips Andover, and at Yale.
Frissell's interest in music aided him to become president of the college glee club, the first Yale glee club to tour the country so far west as Chicago. His graduation in 1874 was followed by a teaching career of two years at De Garmo Institute, Rhinebeck, New York, after which he entered Union Theological Seminary. His course completed there in 1879, he served for a year as assistant pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York.
An appeal to this church to assist the negroes of the South led him, in 1880, to pay a visit to Hampton Institute, Virginia, where he met Samuel Chapman Armstrong and was induced to become the school’s chaplain (1880 - 93). He soon became much more than a chaplain, assuming the responsibilities of principal on the many occasions when Armstrong was absent or ill. Therefore, Frissell, at forty-two, after an apprenticeship of thirteen years, was the logical successor to Armstrong when the latter died in 1893, and he continued to be principal of Hampton Institute until his death, almost a quarter century later. Frissell’s influence, however, went far beyond the limits of the Hampton campus.
Perhaps the most important series of conferences which Frissell helped to organize, and in which he was always a leading spirit, was that begun at Capon Springs, W. Virginia, in 1898, out of which the Southern Education Board developed in 1901. To the wisely managed educational campaigns carried on by this Board, through the “Conferences for Education in the South” which were held annually in the several Southern states in rotation from 1901 to 1915, more than to any other single agency, the South owes a remarkable educational awakening. As a member of the General Education Board, to which he was elected in 1906, Frissell was identified with the promotion of farm and health demonstrations. Traceable to suggestions offered by him are the Jeanes teachers’ supervision of industrial education in the rural negro schools and the state agents’ direction of negro education, the Cooperative Education Association of Virginia, and the Negro Organization Society.
Frissell held to the conviction that improved education for the Southern whites was a necessary preliminary to the education of negroes. Accordingly, as opportunity offered to interest people, both North and South, in this cause, that opportunity was seized.
A schoolmate at Andover describes Frissell as already having “the scholar’s stoop, ” a “quiet mirthfulness, ” a voice of “virile robustness and roundness, ” withal “sober- minded, considerate, careful, in his movements leisurely, yet without any intimation of indolence”. A good tenor voice was a bread-winning and friend-winning asset, “a better asset for college life than a high stand in mathematics” as a Yale classmate put it.
Never claiming credit as a leader, he was credited by those who knew him intimately with an exceptional quality of leadership and with wisdom as a counselor.
Quotes from others about the person
“No man in American public life, ” said a fellow Virginia educator, “has done more to heal the wounds of war, to bind the sections together, to unify the nation, to build up a finer and freer civilization on the ruins of an old order, than this unobtrusive missionary to a backward race”.
Frissell married, November 8, 1883, Julia F. Dodd, daughter of Judge Amzi Dodd of Bloomfield, New Jersey, who with one son survived him.
