• Name:  John Robert Sitlington Sterrett (1851-1914) 
• Sex:  M
• Birth: 04 MAR 1851 Rockbridge Baths, Rockbridge, Virginia
• Death: 15 JUN 1914
• Note:  was an American classical scholar and archeologist. He was Professor of Greek at Cornell University from 1901. He was known for his expeditions, to present-day Turkey and other places in the Near East.^[1]
  
• Father:  Robert Dunlap Sterrett
  Mother:  Nancy Snyder Sitlington

John Robert Sitlington Sterrett

In 1901 Professor J. R. S. Sterrett was elected head of the Department of Greek. As Hewett described his earlier career,

Professor Sterrett has won most distinguished honor by his archaeological explorations in Asia Minor. With rare courage and patience, and almost heroic sacrifice, he had for years conducted expeditions, the object of which had been to discover and translate the ancient inscriptions of this region and to fix the topography of cities, rivers and states. [19]

Professor Sterrett has been described as "a man of very conservative views, of extremely rigorous, even stoical ideal of duty." [20] He viewed the need for large scale archaeological exploration in the Near East as a moral imperative, and his promotional efforts have an evangelical fervor.

As a pilot project Sterrett planned and organized the 1907-08 Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor and the Assyro-Babylonian Orient. On this exploratory survey, Albert T. Olmstead, one of Nathaniel Schmidt's most promising students, "led an ascetic little group through wide ranges of the Turkish Empire--almost literally on foot." [21] On the basis of the finds of the Expedition Sterrett announced that a new corpus of Hittite inscriptions could be published. [22] After disappointing delays The Hittite Inscriptions (Ithaca, 1911) finally appeared, but the rest of the projected publications of the Expedition were never issued. A French reviewer wrote "Why have the members of the Expedition been so late in making known their findings? It is because they are professors in American universities, condemned to a crushing workload of lectures which are not imposed on the scholars of Germany or France. American science suffers from this state of affairs, which does not reflect honor on the richest country in the world." [23]

Sterrett was well aware of the conditions that had handicapped the contributions of American scholarship in the field of research on the Ancient Near East. He therefore drew up a detailed Plea for Research in Asia Minor and Syria (Ithaca, 1911?), in which he outlined the urgent research needs in the area; proposed the formation of an adequately financed and staffed institute to carry out a systematic program of explorations and excavations, and to analyze and publish the findings; and appended endorsements of his plan by a formidable array of scholars and academic bodies in this country and abroad. An edited version of his Plea, titled A Petition for a Subvention for Research Work in Asia Minor and Parts of Syria (Ithaca, 1911?) was directed to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was being organized at the time. The Foundation did not act on his Petition, and the death of Professor Sterrett in 1914, and the outbreak of World War I, put an end to the hopes embodied in Sterrett's plan. When a similar proposal by James H. Breasted was funded by John D. Rockefeller in 1919, and subsequently assisted rather generously by the Rockefeller Foundation, it was the University of Chicago and not Cornell to which the Oriental Institute was attached.

Marriage  Josephine " Josie" Mosely QUARRIER ¹

• Sex: F
• Birth: 2 APR 1861 in Charleston, Kanawha Co., VA
• Death: 1932
• Census: 1870 Kanawha Co., WV., age 10, at home
• Census: 1880 Charleston, Kanawha Co., WV., age 19, at home
• Note:

  Mrs. Josephine Quarrier Sterrett.
  DAR ID Number: 9645
  Born in West Virginia.
  Wife of Prof. J. R. Sitlington Sterrett.
  Descendant of Col. John Cabell, of Virginia.
  Daughter of Joel Shrewsbury Quarrier and Frances Cabell Friend, his wif
  Granddaughter of Thomas R. Friend and Frances Cabell, his wife.
  Gr.-granddaughter of Dr. John Jordan Cabell and Henry Ann Davies, his wife.
  Gr.-gr.-granddaughter of John Cabell and Paulina Jordan, his wife.
  John Cabell was chairman of the Buckingham Committee of Safety and was appointed county lieutenant and chief commander of the militia. He was a member of the House of Delegates and of the Convention of 1776 and one of four patriot brothers who rendered civil and military service during the Revolution. He died in 1815, at the age of eighty.
  Also Nos. 1783, 5403.

  
  
  Father: Joel Shrewsbury QUARRIER b: 18 MAY 1832 in Charleston, Kanawha Co., VA
  Mother: Frances "Fannie" Cabell FRIEND b: 21 FEB 1836 in Charleston, Kanawha Co., VA

• Married:  01 MAR 1892 Charleston, Kanawha, West Virginia

Children

1.  

 

Source: The twentieth century biographical dictionary of notable Americans ...By Rossiter Johnson, John Howard Brown Published by The Biographical soceity, 1904 Item notes: v. 10