Litchfield Law School - Tapping Reeve

Tapping Reeve

Tapping Reeve, the founder of the Litchfield Law School, was born in 1744, son of the Rev. Abner Reeve, a Presbyterian minister who had graduated from Yale in 1731, and his wife Deborah. Tapping Reeve attended the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, graduating in 1763. He remained in Elizabethtown to teach at a grammar school associated with the college. Reeve then tutored at Princeton and was hired to privately teach the orphaned children of the Rev. Aaron Burr, Sr., the former President of the college, and his wife Esther Edwards Burr. Tapping Reeve taught young Aaron Burr and his sister Sally for several years. By 1771 Reeve had moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he studied law with Judge Jesse Root, passing the bar there in 1772.

Reeve moved to Litchfield the same year and established a practice, marrying his former pupil Sally Burr. He built a home on South Street and established a legal practice. In 1774 his brother-in-law, Aaron Burr, left his ministerial studies with the Reverend Joseph Bellamy for the ministry and moved to Litchfield to study the law with Reeve. Burr left a year later to join the Continental Army on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, but Reeve continued to take law students.