"And may the men be always ready, as the years come and go, to carry on, with widening reach and heightened power, the work we sought to do, and did begin!"

That work memorialized by Broadus began formally in 1859 in Greenville, South Carolina.  The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary opened that fall with a class of twenty-six students. Southern Baptists like Charleston pastor Basil Manly, Sr., had long sought a seminary of the South that would train ministers.