Here are a few more little-known facts and quotes about Wofford, collected from various sources.
The first Wofford faculty member to hold the Doctor of Philosophy degree was William M. Baskervill, who studied at the University of Leipzig in Germany before coming to teach at Wofford in 1876. Baskervill left Wofford to finish his Ph.D. at Leipzig in the 1878-1879 academic year, then returned to Wofford from 1879 to 1881, before leaving to take a post at Vanderbilt. Baskervill had been influenced by other German-trained faculty members at Randolph-Macon, and was part of a community of southern scholars studying in Germany. One of his students at Wofford was James H. Kirkland, who also earned a Leipzig doctorate before joining the Vanderbilt faculty. Baskervill and Kirkland both taught Henry Nelson Snyder at Vanderbilt before Snyder joined the Wofford faculty. The doctor of philosophy was a fairly new degree in the 1870s, so it's not unusual that Wofford would not have had a faculty member with that degree until then.
Greek letter fraternities came to Wofford in 1869 when William A. Rogers, a student from Washington College in Virginia, arrived to enroll at Wofford with a reference from Robert E. Lee. A member of Kappa Alpha Order, Rogers organized the fraternity at Wofford. Subsequently, Chi Psi fraternity was organized in 1869, Chi Phi in 1871, Sigma Alpha Epsilon in 1885, Pi Kappa Alpha in 1891, and Kappa Sigma in 1894. When the college banned fraternities in 1904, most of these chapters went underground. Chi Phi and Chi Psi did not return to campus when fraternities were again allowed to organize in 1915. The other four remain active on campus today.
As a result of the Civil War, Wofford suffered financially for decades. D. D. Wallace's History of Wofford College noted that in 1890-91, the trustees were able to pay the faculty their full salaries for the first time since the Civil War.
"Wofford students have always been characterized by great respect for authority" – D. D. Wallace, History of Wofford College, p. 118.
"I never met a Wofford man who didn't have a smart mouth." – Bishop Will Willimon's sergeant at ROTC summer camp, following a pithy question by Willimon on the mine-field training course, as repeated in Willimon's 1994 Wofford commencement address.
There's a million of these, and I hope to keep sharing them.