"The story of higher education in Farmville thus begins not in the town itself but in the hamlet of Hampden-Sydney. It begins well before the single brick building that constituted the Farmville Female Seminary would open its doors for the first class of students in the year 1843. Some seventy years before this, when Prince Edward County was still frontier land, the Hanover Presbytery began planning for the establishment of an institution of higher learning somewhere east of the Blue Ridge- if a local congregation would provide financial support and a suitable donation of land might be seured. A new, young preacher, Samuel Stanhope Smith, recently graduated from the Presbyterian seminary at Princeton but sent south in hopes of alleviation of a respiratory condition, let it be known that he would be willing to undertake the direction of such an institution. Having received pledges of financial support from the congregations of upper Cumberland and Prince Edward along with offers of several possible sites in the locality, on February 1-3, 1775, the Presbytery called a special meeting at Slate Hill Plantation near Prince Edward Courthouse (now Worsham) to lay the groundwork for the new institution."