Wofford College - From The Archives

Wightman Hall, the first "modern" residence

The first Wightman Hall was an experiment that Wofford chose not to repeat. 

In the mid-1950s, with several of the college's residence halls and the main dining facility approaching a half-century of use. Wofford officials began to plan a new facility for students that would combine dorm rooms and a new kitchen and dining room.  The building was on the site of the old Wilbur E. Burnett Gymnasium, and cost about $500,000.  The dorm was originally built for 120 students, with 20 rooms on each of the top three floors.  The rooms were in suites of four rooms, and each suite shared a bathroom.  In a fairly novel design, each dormitory room opened onto outside corridors - essentially, wrap-around balconies.  The dining room, and space for a canteen and bookstore, were on the main floor, and there was a new kitchen in the basement.  Construction begain in 1957 and was completed the next year.  These additional rooms would allow the college to retire some of the older facilities, not to increase the size of the student body. 

As Bishop Will Willimon noted in one of his essays, the person who designed Wightman Hall had no understanding of the perverted mind of the college male.  Wightman was the scene of Wofford's legendary food fight-riot - though reports of food fights and riots in the mid-1960s are legendary.  The open balconies gave students ample opportunity to hone their throwing ability, and if it could be thrown from a fifth floor balcony, someone probably tried it.  Water balloons, tissue paper, and even an occasional mattress would find their way to the ground. 

Wightman was also Wofford's first co-educational residence hall, as the first class of women to live on campus found themselves occupying the top floor of the residence hall. 

The dining room on Wightman's main floor proved to be a fairly short-lived experiment.  With the opening of the Burwell Campus Center next door, the main student dining room moved out of Wightman.  The vacant dining room became the college canteen and bookstore, a situation that lasted until the Campus Life Building opened in 1981.  Renovations to provide a new laundry room and just over a dozen more residence hall rooms began in late 1983 and continued through 1984, with occupancy in the fall of 1985.  Those rooms were considerably nicer than those on the three floors above, partly because they were newer and partly because the rooms opened onto an inside hallway.  And although the dining room had moved, the Wightman basement continued to be used as the college's main kitchen. 

Plans to expand the Milliken Science center caused the college to build a new residence hall on Evins Street in 1998-99, and Wightman Hall was abandoned and demolished in early 1999.  However, the kitchen remains - the residence hall literally had to be demolished around the kitchen.  If you look carefully, the kitchen is sort of hidden behind the Milliken Center.  And, in tribute both to Wofford's first president and to the college's tradition of naming dorms after presidents, the new facility on Evins Street was renamed Wightman Hall. 

Note: It has come to my attention that the 1983 renovation date for Wightman is not entirely correct, so I've modified it in the text above.  Always feel free to correct errors, especially if you remember events differently than I record them!

New Photo Collection

In addition to sharing some of Wofford's history or the history of Methodism in South Carolina on this blog, sometimes I highlight new collections, interesting documents, or old photographs.  Today, I'm hlghlighting a collection of photographs that my student assistants and I have been working on for several months.  Several years ago, I found an old photo album maintained by a Methodist minister from the late 19th century.  With a better scanner and better ways to present these images, my student assistants scanned all of the indivudal photos in the album.  Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to get them uploaded to Flickr and labeled in such a way that a researcher could find them.  

We've added about 35 photos to this point, and there are about 150 in the album in total.  So far, I've got the pictures of a group of bishops, of a few of the ministers, and of some individuals who must have been friends or family members of the Rev. William Wynn Mood, who maintained the album.  

Here's the set page for the William Wynn Mood Album, in Flickr

These photos will be useful to local church historians who are looking for photos of some of their earlier ministers, as the album covers years prior to the first conference biographical directory.  I'll continue to add items to this album until I have the entire set of photos added, with information about as many of the individuals as I can locate.  Then, I'll start adding the photos from the 1901 and 1914 biographical directoies.  

The two photos come from the album.  They are the Rev. Frederick Auld, above, who was a Methodist minister in South Carolina from 1858 to 1902, and Bishop William Wallace Duncan, left, who was a Wofford graduate in 1858, a Methodist minister in Virginia, a Wofford professor, and a Methodist bishop from 1886 to 1908.  

Methodist missionaries

This morning, I was leafing through a 1925 issue of the Southern Christian Advocate, the Methodist newspaper for South Carolina, in search of an answer to a patron's query when I found a special issue on women's foreign and home missionary work.  I noticed the picture of Mary Winn, who was a South Carolina Methodist missionary in China for a number of years from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.  Her name and picture jumped out at me because some years ago, we received a batch of letters she wrote to her family in the College Place neighborhood of Columbia.  Her letters have been processed and are available here in the library.  Here's the link to the collection.  One of the benefits of working in these records over a number of years is that you see so many connections between different parts of the collection.  I noticed in her letter that she talked about learning Chinese and teaching English in a missionary school for girls in Soochow, China, and she commented on how difficult it was for her to learn the Chinese characters.  I am sure many of our students at Wofford today who are studying Chinese would agree with her.  

I thought I might share an excerpt from her letter back to Methodists in South Carolina as it was published in the June 4, 1925 issue of the Advocate.  

Sometimes in writing to our friends back home we wonder what they are most interested in, but I believe they like, most of all, to hear about the work that our schools are doing every day and about the girls in our schools.  That, at least, is what I am most interested in.  Every day there is a new charm and a new attractiveness to the girls in my classes.  Their eyes are so bright and they seem to be just bubbling over with life. While I am writing this there is a group of girls out in the yard playing volley ball and they are entering into this game with all the zest and pep of teen age girls the world over.

This has not been an easy year for us.  Just as we were ready to open school last September the fighting began in this province and it was the first of November before our girls could get here and classes could begin.  Then everything ran smoothly until the last of January when the war rumors bcame more serious.  The fact that the country was at war was very audible to us early one morning when we heard the boom of guns outside the city wall.  There was one night that the Chinese teachers felt that it would be best to have the girls stay together rather than scattered around in their bedrooms so they all brought their mattresses down to the dining room and slept on the floor.  During all this time we tried to be cheerful and happy and to keep up with our regular schedule but of course we didn't know what was going to happen next.  

This year, my time is divided between language study and teaching.  I study Chinese from nine to twelve and teach from one to four.  Just now I am trying to review my examination on Chinese characters.  The second year course requires us to write five hundred characters from memory.  These characters are certainly fascinating and interesting but they have a wicked way of deserting one's brain just at the moment when one needs most to write them, so the mastery of these evasive creatures is a long and tedious process.  

Reading letter such as this one or the dozens of letters in her papers brings us closer to her time and place.  I am sure we could all hear these schoolgirls outside playing volleyball and sense the fear that Mary and her fellow teachers felt when they heard the sounds of war so close.  Archives are about connecting us to our past and keeping alive the actions of people who came before us.  I try to remember that every time I read something from an old newspaper or letter.  

The answer to the mystery building question

No one tried to name that building.  

Last week, I put up a post asking if anyone recognized this building.  Oddly, I didn't get any replies.  

Maybe the building was just too far back in the mists of time for anyone to recognize it.  

The building was the W. E. Burnett Gymnasium, built after a call from President Carlisle to the alumni expressed the need for a first-class gymnasium on the campus.  After Andrews Fieldhouse was constructed in 1929, it saw many alternate uses - perhaps the campus's first adaptive reuse of a building.  It housed the ROTC department, served as a rifle range, a recreational hall (hopefully not at the same time), a canteen, a band room, a classroom, and finally, as the headquarters of the music and art department in the early 1950s.  

It was named for Wilbur E. Burnett of the class of 1876, who was the largest donor and most tireless advocate of its construction.  

It was demolished in 1956 to make way for the original Wightman Hall, a 4-story combination residence hall and dining hall.  

Below is the 1896 fund-raising letter for the old gym.

James A. Chiles: Teacher and Scholar

When James A. Chiles came to Wofford in 1914, he joined a faculty of thirteen professors. He became part of a core group of faculty members who, with only a few changes, taught together for a generation. Seven of these thirteen professors, Chiles included, retired together in 1947. Through difficult economic days all of these professors were devoted to the college, to their students, and to teaching. All of them influenced their students’ lives, but a handful of the faculty members distinguished themselves off campus as well. Upon joining the faculty, Chiles was one of only four Wofford professors to hold an earned doctorate. (The others were David Duncan Wallace in history, Coleman B. Waller in chemistry, and William L. Pugh in English.) Chiles was a noted scholar of the German language, the founder of a national German honorary fraternity, and had influence that extended well beyond the city’s northern border. 

Born in Missouri in 1877, James Alburn Chiles graduated from Central College in Fayette, Missouri in 1895. He attended graduate school at Vanderbilt, studying German, French, and classics and earning his M.A. in 1898. One of his professors there was James H. Kirkland, a member of Wofford’s class of 1877. Chiles followed a well-trod path among young scholars in the 1890s when he traveled to Europe for additional graduate study at the University of Leipzig and the University of Paris. He returned to St. Louis to teach French and German at Washington University for a year, and then spent four years as a journalist on the staff of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He also studied law and was admitted to the Missouri bar. While in St. Louis, he met and married Marie Theresa Dunckel, a member of a prominent ethnic German family in the city. Appointed to an instructorship at the University of Illinois, he undertook studies toward the doctorate in German language and history. After earning his Ph.D. in 1908, he continued teaching at Illinois, published his dissertation, and in 1910, accepted an appointment at Southern University in Alabama. After three years there, and a year at the University of Wisconsin, he came to Wofford to head the department of modern languages. 

Before arriving at Wofford, Dr. Chiles had written his first textbook, German Prose Composition. Earlier copies identified him as a faculty member at Wisconsin, but subsequent printings recognized him as a Wofford professor. His second textbook, German Composition and Conversation, appeared in 1931. In 1935, he and one of his graduate school mentors wrote First Book in German. The book went through two revisions and was republished in 1942 and 1948. In 1940, Chiles wrote Intermediate German Readings, a reader for more advanced college German students. Chiles’ textbooks had wide influence. The American armed forces adopted German Composition and Conversation as a text during World War II, and the book was used in England as well. One of Chiles’ faculty colleagues noted that First Book in German had become a classic, useful both as a reference source and as an elementary textbook. 

Chiles is perhaps best remembered for a group that he, with 21 Wofford students, formed in February 1928. Known simply as Deutscher Verein, or German Union, the organization promoted the study of German language and culture. The club became an active literary organization on campus. Chiles used his contacts at other colleges and universities to promote the idea of a national German honor society. Within a year, he and student John O. Eidson ‘29, later a dean at the University of Georgia, had organized Delta Phi Alpha National Honorary German Fraternity. Wofford became home to the alpha chapter, and Central College, Chiles’ alma mater, became home to the beta chapter. For the rest of his life, Chiles worked to promote Delta Phi Alpha and watched it grow to some 9,000 members at his death. 

Chiles retired from the faculty following his 70th birthday in 1947. His students and colleagues all spoke highly both of his character and his scholarship, recognizing the disciplined approach he took to his research and teaching. One student, Herbert Hucks ’34, who became college librarian and archivist, noted that “from the moment I entered Dr. Chiles’ classroom, his scholarship, his sense of humor, and his interest in having every student do his best impressed me.” Another student who became a colleague was Professor W. Raymond Bourne ’23, who remembered that “He loved German and transmitted something of this love to generations of students.”

Mystery - Name That Building!

Here's a challenge from the archives to all of you out there.  Name this building.  

As you can see from the second picture, it doesn't exist on the campus any more, but it stood for many years.  

 

I don't have any prizes other than bragging rights for those of you who can tell me what it is, but if you want to make a guess, you can leave a comment.  

John Quitman Hill – from Textile Mill Worker to Rhodes Scholar

Only five Wofford graduates have been named Rhodes Scholars, three in the earliest years of the program and two since World War II.  One of these five, Professor John Quitman Hill, has a particularly interesting biography.  A childhood illness prevented him from attending school until he was eleven years old.  Many children would never catch up after such a late start, but not only did John Hill graduate from high school only seven years later, he went on to earn some of the highest academic honors in the world. 

After he graduated from Gaffney High School, he took a job in a textile mill in Lyman, where he met and married his wife.  He became part of a substantial number of students who worked in textile mills while attending Textile Industrial Institute, now Spartanburg Methodist College. 

During World War II, he enlisted in the U. S. Marine Corps.  In 1945, following  the end of World War II, he enrolled at Wofford as a sophomore and graduated at the end of the 1947 summer term.  The newly minted college graduate was 28 years old.  While at Wofford, he worked at night in the Pacific Mill in Lyman as a card grinder.  He completed his Wofford courses with all A’s and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  A year later, he won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, and from 1948 to 1951, he studied at Oxford.  He earned his B. A. in the Honours School of Mathematics, working with such scholars as J. S. deWet,, E. C. Thompson, J. H. C. Whitehead, and E. C. Titchmarsh.  His primary fields of study were pure and applied mathematics and Riemanian geometry. 

Returning with his family to South Carolina, he taught high school in Duncan briefly before going on to teach at the University of Tennessee.  He returned to Spartanburg, where he taught briefly at Converse before joining the Wofford faculty in 1953.  In 1955, he was awarded the Oxford Master of Arts degree, entitling him to sit as a member of Oxford’s Convocation. 

A devoted teacher, Hill became one of the college’s first John M. Reeves professors in 1958 at the same time he was named chairman of the mathematics department.  Dean’s List students recognized him for superior teaching, and he received the college’s inaugural distinguished teaching award in 1961.  Students in the yearbook noted that he always had time for students, and claimed that “everything looks easy when he explains it.”  No small compliment for a mathematician. 

Professor Hill died after a long illness in 1972 at the young age of 53.  Known for his interdisciplinary interests, Professor Hill conceived of an interdisciplinary seminar for faculty to examine the first principles of the various disciplines taught at Wofford.  That interest was reflected in the creation of the John Q. Hill memorial lecture series at the college.  The math department’s award for its most outstanding senior is also named in his honor.