Reading law, the tutelage method to become an attorney, was then the norm, rather than attending law school. But two years of reading law only made him want to go to a real law school. There were then merely a few law schools of any consequence in the country. He selected Yale. However, Alonzo Cornell, who was the eldest son of Cornell’s founder Ezra Cornell, talked George into going to Cornell Law School instead. That encouragement is a bit startling, as the Law School did not yet exist. In the fall of 1887 George would arrive in Ithaca as a member of the school’s inaugural class. George followed a demanding curriculum to his graduation in 1890. The Law School’s catalogue for 1889–1890 ordained: Each member of the Senior Class who is a candidate for a degree, is required to prepare and deposit with the Faculty, at least one month before graduation, a thesis, not less than forty folios in length, upon some legal topic selected by himself and approved by the Faculty. The production must be satisfactory in matter, form, and style; and the student presenting it is examined upon it.
Morrill Hall, 1887, where the first Cornell law students studied
…Alonzo Cornell, who was the eldest son of Cornell’s founder Ezra Cornell, talked George into going to Cornell Law School instead. That encouragement is a bit startling, as the law school did not yet exist. In the fall of 1887 George would arrive in Ithaca as a member of the school’s inaugural class.
Accordingly, George presented a typed thesis, entitled Trial by Jury. This markedly anti-jury work appears, in its original form, in The Indomitable George Washington Fields. RETURN to HAMPTON : 18 91 –19 3 2
The family had stayed close, with Martha Ann always at its heart. The 1880 census had shown his siblings John
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(laborer), James (teacher), and Catherine (teacher) to be living with their mother in their original home on Wine Street in Hampton. Down the street lived brother Robert (farm laborer) and his family. (On June 14, 1880, the census taker had found George working for the summer as a waiter in a hotel and living with his younger sister Maria, who had married and moved with her husband to Andover, Massachusetts.)
So after Cornell Law School, in the fall of 1890, George returned to Hampton to practice law. In those days, a law school graduate needed to apprentice for a period and take the bar exam. George did both. His older brother James was now a married lawyer. George read law in James’s law office, and he took an oral examination before three judges. He was admitted to the Virginia bar in April 1891. By this time, the detail in George’s autobiography is really thinning out. He wrote it for his family. Accordingly, he emphasized his early life, which would be of more interest and less known to his progeny than his life as a lawyer A big, albeit unmentioned, event was the 1891 death of his beloved mother. George soon began building his own family. On November 28, 1892, he married Sarah (Sallie) Haws Baker, who had attended the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, and who appeared on later censuses as a chiropodist but in her obituary as a hairdresser. Of their long and happy union, George’s autobiography says simply that “her constant help, encouragement and inspiration was of inestimable value to me. The issue of our marriage was a girl and a boy. My son died when but an infant.”