1867–1953 · educator, Virginia school superintendent, college president
Joseph Dupuy Eggleston Jr. (1867–1953) was Virginia’s first popularly elected state superintendent of public instruction (1906–1912), later president of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) and of Hampden-Sydney College. A tireless champion of public schooling and childhood literacy, in 1910 he pressed the point that a person who can read but doesn’t is scarcely better off than one who cannot — the seed of the maxim later pinned on Mark Twain.