George Soule (educator)

Born in Barrington, New York, his father, Ebenezer Soulé, died when Soule was three years old. Soule's mother later remarried to William H. Babcock, and in 1842 the family moved to DeKalb County, Illinois, where Soule lived on a farm until he was fourteen. He then entered Sycamore Academy at Sycamore, Illinois, graduating in 1853, and soon afterward moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to study medicine. He took a two years course in the McDowell Medical College and he also studied law and the commercial sciences in the Jones Business College, from which he graduated in 1856. In November 1856, Soule moved to New Orleans and opened the Soule Commercial College and Literary Institute. The college, and his association with it, thereafter continued for the rest of his life, except for the few years when the school was closed during the American Civil War. ==Military service==

During the war, Soule joined the Confederate States Army, in 1862, going to the front as captain of Company A, Crescent Regiment of Louisiana Volunteers, commanded by Col. Marshall J. Smith. Soule served with the Army of the Tennessee and the Trans-Mississippi Department. On the second day of the great Battle of Shiloh, on April 7, 1862, he was wounded and captured, was sent to prison on Johnson's Island in Lake Erie, and exchanged at Vicksburg September 17, 1862. The Crescent Regiment, originally mustered for ninety days, was reorganized in the fall of 1862 with Soule as major. On the death of Lieut. Col. G. P. McPheeters at Labadieville, October 27, 1862, Soule succeeded to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and with the reorganized regiment he participated in all the engagements on the Bayou Teche, at Berwick Bay, the Battle of Fort Bisland, and others until November 3, 1863, when the regiment was united with the Confederate Guards, Response Battalion and the Eighteenth Battalion to form the consolidated Crescent Regiment. He was then temporarily assigned to post duty and later appointed by Gen. E. Kirby Smith as chief of the Labor Bureau District of Western Louisiana. There he served until June 9, 1865, when he was paroled from service. ==Educational career==

Soule returned to New Orleans to find his school property destroyed or confiscated, but undertook to rebuild the school. ==Personal life and death==

On September 6, 1860, Soule married Mary Jane Reynolds of Summit, Mississippi, with whom he had nine children, of whom six survived to adulthood. Soule's wife died in 1918. Soule died eight years later, in his home in New Orleans, at the age of 91. At the time of his death, it was noted that Soule College was "probably the oldest institution of its type in the South". ==References==