Potter College for Young Ladies Exhibit
Bowling Green, Kentucky
1889-1909

Reverend Benjamin Francis Cabell

Benjamin Francis Cabell, the son of Lucy Ann Cox and Thomas Jefferson Cabell, was born on June 6, 1850 in Taylor County, Kentucky.  He attended school in Bedford, Indiana and in 1872 completed a year's study at Ohio Wesleyan University.  He returned to Taylor County as an ordained minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

In August 1875 Cabell became principal of the preparatory department of Warren College, a school for boys in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  The college was struggling financially and as a consequence the trustees required Cabell and two other teachers to bear all expenses of running the school.  Their salaries were to be paid out of tuition revenue, with the trustees bearing no responsibility for any shortfall.

Warren College suspended operations in June 1876 and Cabell returned to Taylor County, where he married 22-year-old Ellen Douglas Patteson, who had grown up less than ten miles away from him.  Ellen had attended the highly regarded Science Hill School in Shelbyville, where she was a model student.  She was said to have been on a stagecoach with "a bevy of school-girls" when her future husband, returning to Ohio Wesleyan after a vacation, first saw her.

In 1877 Cabell was appointed president of Cedar Bluff College, a school for girls near Woodburn, Kentucky.  He and Mrs. Cabell taught there for over a decade.  Cabell became familiar to the citizens of Bowling Green, ten miles to the north, as he regularly passed through town accompanying students to and from their homes.  The Bowling Green Gazette endorsed both Cedar Bluff and President Cabell who, with a "nature gentle and kind with them yet positive and controlling," seemed "naturally adapted to the care of young ladies."