A dozen years after Beloit was founded, a young instructor from Yale came to Beloit to become one of the first two faculty members of the infant college.

Joseph Emerson, born 1821 in Norwalk, Connecticut and reared in Andover, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor in the Seminary, was one of those New England Puritans who came West to participate in the civilizing mission of college and church in the brand new state. Initially professor of languages, which meant Greek and Latin, Joseph Emerson became professor of Greek after William Porter joined the faculty in the early 1850’s.

A life-long disciple of the culture of classical Greece, Emerson opened the doors of the classical past to a full forty years of Beloit College classes. On the occasion of his fortieth anniversary at the college, alumni and some friends presented Professor Emerson with a gold watch and a chain of forty links. Inside the case was the inscription (in Greek) from Zenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates: “Thou has caused many to think on virtue.” And as one alumnus observed, this event celebrated “that steady stream of influence flowing for these forty years from the throne of the Greek Room (in Middle College) into all this western country, exerting its full power toward converting the earlier wilderness into the later land of Promise.”

Emerson’s first wife, Mary Cordelia North, had died in the 1870’s. A widower for some years, Joseph Emerson married Helen F. Brace in 1884 and for the remaining sixteen years of his life had a companion who shared his interests and enthusiasms to the fullest. Madam Emerson, a cousin of Frances Willard, had a significant career of her own prior to her marriage. A graduate of Milwaukee Female College, she had taught there for a decade and later taught at Wellesley College.

English literature was her special field, but art was her fully consuming passion and in this she and her husband found their great aim and goal – an Art Collection and even a museum, for Beloit College. As early as the end of the 1870’s, Joseph Emerson had his Greek classes present the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles.

He had spent a year in Europe in the early 1870’s and then in 1888, after 40 years of teaching, he succumbed to extreme fatigue and he and Mrs. Emerson went abroad, staying in Europe for almost two years. They toured the great museums of Europe and steeped themselves in the classical remains of Greece.

The Emersons returned to the United States in 1891, just in time to participate in Professor Emerson’s 50th anniversary of his Yale class. Professor Emerson passed away August 4, 1900.