I’ve been trying to add more history content to the college archives website, and I have felt for some time that we needed a new biography of Benjamin Wofford.
Our founder has been the subject of quite a few talks over the years, and many speakers have tried to figure out what inspired Benjamin Wofford to make such a substantial gift to found a college. Authors of articles have tried to tease out meaning from various anecdotes. And there’s a good reason for this.
Ben didn’t leave much of a paper trail. There’s no diary, no letters, no essays, no voluminous correspondence. All we have are reminiscences. The only reason have been able to document as much about him as we have is because of his wealth. So, writers and speakers have taken what we know and added in a few anecdotes about Ben that have come down through stories told by other speakers. There’s a lot of folklore about Ben Wofford, but are those stories true?
I decided that I wanted to write a new biographical sketch about our founder, and I have tried to go back to the sources that exist and to try to stick as much as possible to the facts that we can document. If you’re interested, you can follow the link below to the article on the college website.
http://www.wofford.edu/library/archives/benjamin-wofford.aspx