Wofford College - From The Archives

Bishop A. Coke Smith

There’s a story, and I can’t find the citation this morning, that a man had moved from Columbia to Spartanburg in the late 19^th century, but was shortly thereafter seen on the streets of Columbia.  When a friend inquired why he was back in the capital city, the man replied that to live in Spartanburg, one had to accept three things as fact, that Wofford College was the greatest  educational institution since Oxford, that Dr. James Carlisle, Wofford’s president, was the greatest astronomer since Copernicus, and that Wofford professor Coke Smith was the greatest pulpit orator since Saint Paul.  And he’d be darned if he could accept them all! 

Alexander Coke Smith may not have been the greatest pulpit orator since Paul, but he must have been pretty good, because within two years of his graduation from Wofford, he had been assigned to Washington Street Methodist Church in Columbia, which, despite its encounter with fire in 1865, was arguably the most important Methodist pulpit in the most important city in the Conference. 

Born in Lynchburg, in Sumter County, in 1849, Coke Smith was the son of The Rev. William H. Smith, a member of the South Carolina Annual Conference.  He studied at Wofford from 1868 to 1872, and after his graduation, he taught in the Reidville, SC high school for a term.  He joined the South Carolina Conference in December 1872 and was appointed to the church in Cheraw.  The next year, he was sent to Washington Street Church in Columbia, where he served for three years.  This was quite a leap for someone who was so new in the ministry, for Washington Street was (and remains) a large and influential congregation.  At the end of 1876, he was sent to Greenville, where he served Buncombe Street Church for four years.  He then went to Trinity in Charleston, serving for three years, and at that point, he was made the presiding elder for the Columbia District.  Before he had passed his 32^nd birthday, he had been appointed to large churches in three of the state’s largest cities, and had met with success in each appointment. 

In 1884, he was named to fill a vacancy on Wofford’s board of trustees, and in 1886, when Wofford professor William Wallace Duncan was elected a bishop, Smith was elected to fill his chair on the Wofford faculty.  At the same time, the trustees voted to relieve Smith of the teaching obligations that came with being Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, the chair to which he had just been named, so that he might work on behalf of the college in the churches around the state.  By the 1880s, it had become common for one of the faculty members to act as financial agent of the college, serving essentially as the college’s development officer.  W. W. Duncan did this, as did Coke Smith, and later, John C. Kilgo.  All three were effective in raising funds and promoting the college to Methodists in the state, and each man used his position to launch himself to an even higher position in the church hierarchy.  Smith also served as the college’s treasurer, handling much of the institution’s business. 

After four years at Wofford, Smith was elected one of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South’s missionary secretaries by the General Conference.  He left that position quickly to take a professorship  of practical theology at Vanderbilt’s divinity school.  After two years, he moved back into the local church, but this time, in Virginia.  He served in the Old Dominion until his election as a bishop in 1902.  He actually came close to being elected in 1898, and in 1891 and 1901, he had attended the great ecumenical conferences.  It's unfortunate that his time in the episcopacy was actually quite short, for he died in Asheville, NC in December 1906.  

Aerial Photos of the Wofford Campus

Today I posted a series of aerial photos of the campus to my Flickr page and made them available from the Wofford Archives web page.  

Photos do more than simply let you see what a place looked like at a specific time, though that's certainly important.  More than that, they tell a story.  This series of photos shows how, slowly but surely, the Wofford of today grew out of a small collection of buildings.  Many of the buildings in these pictures are still with us, though modified.  Some buildings deteriorated to the point that they no longer served a purpose and were demolished.  We haven't torn down many buildings here, but some have been.  

These photos document the changing landscape of the campus over the past 90 years.  When I see a picture of the campus, I generally use the presence or absence of certain buildings to establish a date or an approximate date for the building.  Of course, sometimes the best we can do is guess within a certain range.  

The earliest photo appears to be from the 1920s.  That's about as specific as I can get, because we didn't build things quite as often back then as we have in recent years.  

Here's the 1920s photo

Here is a slide show of the various images.

Enjoy the slides.  If you want to see full versions of the images, see the set on Flickr.  You can also check out other collections I've posted there.  

What's an Annual Conference?

I haven't written much about the Methodist half of my job lately.  In fact, I have been a little bit remiss in maintaining the blog since Commencement on May 17.  Since graduation, I've been catching up on some reference questions and trying to get ready to process some interesting collections this summer.  I still intend on posting some information about the Class of 1959, who celebrated the 50th anniversary of their graduation this year.  

This week, I attended the Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in South Carolina.  An Annual Conference is a confusing term, for it is a geographic region, a meeting, and an organization.  The South Carolina Annual Conference is an organization that includes all of the United Methodist congregations in the geographic area of South Carolina, and that meets once a year.  All ordained Methodist clergy - elders and deacons - are members of the conference, and they are appointed annually by our bishop to serve the churches in the state.  They, together with local pastors and lay representatives from all of the churches, meet once a year (or more often, if a special session is called) to conduct the church's business.  

I am a lay member of the South Carolina conference not because I'm the conference's archivist, but because I have been selected by my local congregation.  However, my local congregation selects me largely because I'm the conference archivist and it's helpful that I attend.  

So, what does this organization do?  Well, there's a lot of sitting in meetings.  We hear reports from various conference boards, commissions, and committees.  We talk about ministry plans for the upcoming year.  This year, there was a lot of talk about new church starts, and most of the worship leaders were ministers involved in starting new churches.  We also talk about our work in supporting the conference's retirement homes, the children's home, ministries for people with special needs, and for our four colleges.  We allocate money in our budget to support these, and also to pay for important items like retirement pensions, insurance for clergy, and for global ministries.  We give awards - and the commission I work with recognized a number of churches for their work in preserving church history.  We also proposed naming a church in Chesterfield County a historic site of South Carolina Methodism.  There's time for worship, and for fellowship.  

The fellowship is especially important because clergy are actually not members of local churches - their church membership rests in the Annual Conference, so in a very real sense, the Annual Conference is their church.  Most of the clergy know each other - many have been coming to Conference for years - or decades.  Many of them attended seminary together, served in neighboring churches before being sent to churches far apart, or have served on conference boards together.  Conference is the one time each year where they are all together.  It sort of makes some of us in the laity feel like we're standing around the edges watching the fellowship.  One retired minister who attends my local church - who has known me since I was three years old - told me on Monday that this was his 60th consecutive Annual Conference, and also his last.  I pause here to reflect on how the conference, the state, and ministry in general have changed since he entered the ministry some 60 years ago.  

And in fact, that's the main reason I attend the conference: to act in a limited way as a collector of information, of stories, and of memories.  I talked with at least three district superintendents about church records, and with several lay members who have done research in the archives.  I do my bit of advocacy for the archives and for historic preservation.  I sort of stand out at conference because of my age - until people look at my nametag, they often think I'm in the clergy because there aren't many youngish lay representatives.  Someone in the elevator recognized my name on my nametag and offered that she had expected that the archivist would be a little older.  I've been attending conferences myself since 1993, when I was one of Wofford chaplain Talmage Skinner's student workers helping to run the behind-the-scenes logistics.  This was my 7th year as a lay member, which is amazing considering I'm not even 40 yet.  Part of my job is to collect materials that document the session, but also to collect those things that don't always get written down.  

So that's Annual Conference in a nutshell.