Anyone who has been around Wofford for any length of time knows that Main Building is the heart of the college. For nearly half a century, it was, quite simply, the college. No other public buildings existed on the campus. Though it has been modified a number of times and completely renovated on two occasions, Main Building has always existed in one form or another.
It has existed in its most elemental form ever since the fourth day of July in 1851, when Benjamin Wofford’s hand-picked trustees, joined by friends from South Carolina’s Methodist Conference, and hundreds of citizens of Spartanburg, gathered to lay its cornerstone. Some four thousand strong, they met on the courthouse square and marched in a procession to a plot of land on the city’s northern border, a plot selected by the trustees and described by the Carolina Spartan as a “most lovely elevation, embracing lawn and woodland, about one half to three-fourths of a mile north of the Court-House.”
The trustees had a plan, prepared by Charleston architect Edward C. Jones, for an Italianate, three story building with twin towers. Following Trustee chairman and future president William M. Wightman’s fifty-minute address, and with rites led by Spartanburg’s Masonic lodge, the trustees laid the cornerstone. The cornerstone itself, “a fine specimen of granite” from a nearby quarry, was presented by Major H. J. Dean. It contained a lead box, into which the participants placed a Bible, a copy of
Benjamin Wofford’s will, a lock of his hair and of Maria Wofford’s hair, a copy of the Southern Christian Advocate and the Spartan, and a police report with some statistical information about Spartanburg. In addition, various civic groups, including the Sons of Temperance, the Odd Fellows and the Masons placed materials about their organizations into the cornerstone, and the building committee placed a silver medal engraved with the name of the founder, the date, and the amount of the bequest. Members of the audience placed a few other items in the box, and it was sealed.
Almost a year passed before the building committee signed a contract to build the Main Building, and three years passed before the college opened its doors on August 1, 1854. Meanwhile, in what perhaps is the first example of what we now call “the Wofford way,” the cornerstone’s
location was forgotten. The Spartan wrote that it was in the southeast corner of the building, though Masonic custom would have placed it in the northeast corner. Some speculated that the building might have been built such that the cornerstone was beneath an internal wall.
By the early 1950s, with the college’s centennial looming, officials began to search for the cornerstone in earnest. While he was reading an old issue of the Advocate in November 1953, freshman George Duffie
discovered that the cornerstone was in the northeast corner of the building. On March 2, 1954, the lead box
was removed from the cornerstone, but a leak in the box had caused most of the contents to be ruined. After a few months of display in the library, the contents were replaced in the cornerstone in a ceremony on Founder’s Day 1954. A plaque above the cornerstone will keep members of the community from forgetting
where the cornerstone rests in 2054.
Pictured: a daguerreotype of Main Building, the oldest photograph of the campus, and a portrait of William Wightman, the college’s first president.