Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, on December 28, 1856. He was the third of four children of Janet Woodrow and Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister. He spent his childhood in Augusta, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina; graduated from Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) in 1879; and attended the University of Virginia Law School. In 1885 he married Ellen Louise Axson of Rome, Georgia, and took a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College, which he held for three years. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1886, and joined the faculty of Wesleyan College. In 1890, he began a distinguished career at Princeton University, where he was named president in 1902.
