Author: Phillip Stone

I've been the archivist of Wofford College and the South Carolina United Methodist since 1999. I'll be sharing college, Methodist, and local history, documents, photographs, and other interesting stories on this blog, which I've been keeping since December 2007.

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Academics Documents Faculty

Interim 1968

Wofford’s faculty and students have returned to campus today to start the Interim.  This year marks the 45th time that the college has devoted the month of January to these non-traditional projects.  After nearly half a century, Interim is as much a part of Wofford’s culture as Main Building.

What was the first Interim like?  I dug out the catalog for Interim 1968 to see what projects were offered in that first year.  I was interested to see that the projects (we don’t call them courses!) were arranged by departments, with only a few at the end that were described as “multi-departmental.”  It took until 1971 to break the practice of listing courses by department.

The 1968 catalog of projects did not list professors with projects, but a separate list indicated who was leading each project.  Some professors proposed two projects, though they seemed to be directed-research-type projects.

Here are a few pages from the catalogue.  These projects were sponsored by biologists, political scientists, historians, psychologists, and religion professors.  I’ll make the whole catalogue available elsewhere.  And, over the next few weeks, I’ll try to look at some other notable Interim projects.

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Academics Faculty Photographs Uncategorized

Doc Rock

One of the dangerous privileges of working at a place like Wofford is getting to write and talk about people I’ve never met.  It’s relatively safe to write about campus characters of several generations ago, since very few people are around who knew them and who can correct my errors.  It is a whole lot more risky to write about people who others on campus still remember.

One of the many professors whose legacy is still felt on campus was Dr. John W. Harrington, who was professor of geology and department chair from 1963 until 1981, and then professor emeritus until his death in April 1986.  Born in Illinois and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Harrington attended Virginia Tech, where he majored in mining engineering.  After taking his MA and PhD in geology at the University of North Carolina in 1946 and 1948, respectively, he moved to Texas, where he was a geology professor at Southern Methodist University from 1949 to 1956.  While in Texas, he was a consultant to several oil companies, where he focused on petroleum exploration on a regional wildcatting basis.

So how did a mining engineer-wildcat oil consultant geologist wind up chairing the geology department at a liberal arts college?  Dr. Harrington later recounted that he wanted more than to teach his students at SMU (most of whom probably wanted to be oil geologists) more than to be good technicians and engineers.  He tried to teach them ways to think about science.  This led, he reported, to a rebellion in his classes.  He resigned, choosing to go into industry.  The story goes that in 1963, he was on a plane with Dean Philip Covington, and soon found himself recruited to come to Wofford, where he could teach geology in a different way.

Almost all of Dr. Harrington’s geology labs were conducted in the field.  He took students to the Tennessee mountains, the South Carolina coast, and everywhere in between, showing them “the literature of geology in the language in which it is written – the rocks, the streams, the shores, and the landforms.” His Interims were also 4-week investigations into local and regional geology.

Dr. Harrington wrote for the scientist and the literate generalist.  His book To See a World takes its title from a poem by William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a Heaven in a wildflower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an Hour.”  The book begins with a preface about understanding science, and each chapter explores some principle about science, geology, the history of geology, and combining all of these principles.  One of his chapter on historical geology was called “The wasness of the is.”

Dance of the ContinentsAnother of his books, Dance of the Continents, is written around Harrington’s first law of science, which his editor told him to make up as a way of organizing the book.  The law is “Nature is scrutable when everything is seen in context.”  He sets out to build that context.

It is a great gift to students and alumni when a professor is not only a specialist in a discipline, but can also place that work in a greater context. “Doc Rock,” as students called him affectionately, did not simply teach the students how to identify different kinds of minerals, he taught them a way of looking at the world around them and understanding it.  And that’s the true gift of a teacher.

 

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Documents Sports

Football playoffs

As a tribute to Wofford’s post-season football appearance against the University of Northern Iowa tomorrow, here’s a reminder of a game of nearly 62 years ago – when Wofford went to a bowl game.

After an impressive 11-0 regular season and a 23-game streak without a loss (in 1948, the Terriers were 4-0-5), Wofford was invited to the 1950 Shrine Cigar Bowl game in Tampa, Florida.  They faced the Seminoles of Florida State, which had only resumed playing football after World War II.  Newspapers heralded the football battle between “two of the nation’s best little college grid teams.”  And, Wofford was favored in the match.

Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell the Seminoles.

They won the January 2, 1950 tilt by a score of 19-6, ending Wofford’s 23-game undefeated streak.

Here’s the game program from that day – which saw South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond leading the South Carolina delegation to the event.  Towns along the way hosted Wofford fans, and many Terrier friends enjoyed lots of orange juice and cigars while in Florida.

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Uncategorized

Burwell – 40 years and counting

For over 40 years, Wofford students have been eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Burwell Campus Center, but few probably know who the building was named for or how it has evolved over the years.

Planned in the late 1960s when the student body numbered closer to 1,000 students, the Burwell Campus Center was designed to be not just a student center, but a place to serve the entire campus community.  The building, designed by Spartanburg architects Chapman, McMillan and Associates, was a steel and brick structure, and its glass atrium quickly became an iconic space on campus.  The total cost for the building, which would bring together a number of different student activities as well as the main dining room, was about $1.2 million.

Among the facilities included in the new building were a campus post office, a large lounge, a private dining room, a conference room, and a large multi-purpose room.  A number of offices – mostly for student affairs – were included on the ground floor. A number of other offices were available for student government, the interfraternity council, and the Student Christian Council.  A dining room and serving areas for 500 students dominated the upper floor.  Rather than build a new kitchen, the college instead opted to use the existing kitchens built in the late 1950s in the basement of neighboring Wightman Hall and connect them by a service corridor. Prepared food, placed in food warmers, was moved from the kitchen to the new building and using an elevator, taken up to the serving area. Interestingly enough, in 1969 this was considered an improvement over the existing set-up, where food was transported from the Wightman basement to a dining room on the main floor by a dumbwaiter.

The building was named in honor of Ernest and Ethel Burwell, who were among the lead donors for the center.  Mr. Burwell was known around Spartanburg for his Chevrolet dealership, was a community philanthropist, founding or co-founding the children’s Christmas basket program, the Spartanburg Mental Health Clinic, and was involved in the Salvation Army and the United Way.  He helped create a number of scholarships now administered through the Spartanburg County Foundation.  He had been part of the Spartanburg community since 1920 and was a U. S Navy veteran of both World War I and World War II.  He retired with the rank of commander.

The building was formally opened on November 8, 1969.  Other rooms in the building were named for Rose and Walter Montgomery and for the Honorable J. Neville Holcombe.

Like all such buildings, the Burwell Campus Center has seen a number of changes over the years.  The dining room has been remodeled a few times, but is now cramped at certain times.  Many of the offices later moved – none of the student organizations remained in the building for long, and many of them decamped for the Campus Life Building in 1981.  The student affairs office likewise moved to new digs in the early 1980s.  Career Services occupied several offices in Burwell until the early 2000s.

The Wofford Theatre Workshop got its start in the Montgomery Room in 1970, and spent time in the old Carlisle Hall before finding a permanent home in Tony White Theater.  That room, the Montgomery Room, is now used as the faculty dining room.  The original faculty dining room, which only seated about 36 people, is the serving area for the new dining room.

Two offices later became the president’s and dean’s dining rooms, and now, merged into one, are a larger dean’s dining room, or Gingko Room.  A storage closet just outside of the Montgomery Room has become a small dining room.  The large lounge, now known as the AAAS Lounge, had a segment partitioned to serve as a career services library.  Later, the office of communications and marketing took the space vacated by career services, and they are the main administrative occupant of the building today.

Students have had a variety of nicknames for the dining room over the years – in tribute to Food Services Director Earl Buice, it was sometimes called “Buice’s Bistro.”  Later, when William May was director, students in the 1990s called it the “Bill May Cafe.”  I don’t know what students call it today – but the choices offered to today’s students (and faculty and staff) are undeniably more plentiful than they have ever been.  The room is a little more crowded today, but whenever I eat upstairs, I can still remember eating bagels and lucky charms for dinner with my classmates at our table – which came to be called the “sauce table” because of its proximity to the condiments.

Photos, top to bottom: the atrium and stairs leading up to the dining room, Burwell in 1987, and the dining room, also probably from the 1980s.  

Categories
Faculty Students

Are there ghosts at Wofford?

Reprinted from the November 1, 1991 Old Gold and Black

Back in 1991, I was an occasional staff writer for the Old Gold and Black, and my friend and editor Russ Singletary asked me to look into ghost stories at the college. 

I didn’t find much, but what I found wound up in this article. 

To celebrate Halloween this year, the Old Gold and Black staff tried to find a few ghost stories about Wofford.  There are not a lot of them.

Dr. Lewis Jones, a 1938 Wofford graduate and professor of history, emeritus, said “If you want Wofford ghost stories, you’ll have to make them up yourself.”

Dr. Jones also said most of the ghosts and goblins around Wofford are running around in academic regalia.

Nonetheless, we found a few stories, and here they are.

Dr. Talmage Skinner, a 1956 graduate who is now college chaplain, remembers a story from his days as a senior here at Wofford.

A student went into DuPre Administration Building and started up the stairs.  A man passed him on the stairs.

When the student reached the landing, he looked up at the portrait of Dean Mason DuPre and realized the man he had passed was Dean DuPre.  He looked back down the stairs and discovered that  the man had disappeared.

The student got out of the building with amazing speed.  The story spread around campus almost as fast.

Michael Preston, a 1963 graduate who is now dean of students, lives in Carlisle House with his family. The house has been the home of the dean of students for quite a while.

During the Civil War, two Confederate soldiers died of smallpox in Carlisle House.  A hospital used to be located across the railroad tracks from Wofford, and patients were sometimes brought to houses at Wofford for treatment.

One of Dean Preston’s children used to hear noises that made her think that someone was in the room with her.  Both Dean Preston and his wife occasionally think they hear noises.

“I’ve thought there was something up there sometimes myself,” said Dean Preston.  Could Carlisle House be haunted by the ghosts of two 15-to 17- year old Confederate soldiers?

Several people have reported strange sounds and sights around Old Main at night.  Not long ago, one maintenance man, who has since died, heard Dr. James Carlisle’s footsteps and cane in the hall near the computer center [note – this is the hall near the Campus Ministry Center].  Several years back, another staff member reported seeing Dr. Carlisle walking down the hall near the computer center.

Dr. Skinner said that there was once a restroom near the back door of Old Main.  Perhaps Dr. Carlisle was looking for that restroom to see if anyone else was haunting Old Main.

So, there are a few ghost stories and occasional strange events around Wofford.  You may want to watch out whenever you work in Old Main late at night, or you may meet Dr. Carlisle or some other former faculty member.

Categories
Brushes with History Photographs

George H. W. Bush visits Wofford, 1980

Spartanburg has often been a stop on the presidential campaign trail, and Wofford has seen candidates drop by over the years.  Former President Gerald R. Ford dropped in to meet classes and hold a press conference in April 1980, as I’ve noted in a previous blog.  Future president George H. W. Bush, who in 1980 was running for vice president on the ticket with Ronald Reagan, made an appearance at Wofford on October 14 of that year.

Bush’s visit lasted just over an hour, but it was the only place that he gave a public address during his trip to South Carolina.  He also spoke with reporters on his arrival at the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport.  Two South Carolina political leaders who probably had a great deal of influence over the trip, Senator Strom Thurmond and Congressman Carroll Campbell, accompanied the future vice president.  They both spoke before Bush, Campbell to criticize the Carter administration for failing to control inflation.  Thurmond assailed the administration for not spending more on defense.  The senior senator also encouraged the audience to examine Bush closely, for “When you look at him, you may not only be looking at the next vice president of the United States, but also at a future president.

The future vice president and president was introduced by Kevin Childs, the Wofford student body president.  Bush, who was the former director of central intelligence and a former ambassador to China and to the United Nations, spoke in Leonard Auditorium.  His remarks, not surprisingly given his background, were largely about foreign policy.  He talked about arms limitations talks, the pending SALT II treaty, and relations with China and Taiwan.  He also promised to protect the area’s textile jobs.  Bush took questions from the audience, promising to take or dodge them, whichever best helped the campaign.  Some of the questions were about China, trade, his potential role as vice president, and arms control.  He received considerable applause and a standing ovation from the audience of well over 1,000 in attendance.

Wofford students noted that watching the activities of the national press corps that arrived with candidate Bush was almost as exciting as seeing the future vice president himself.

As president, George H. W. Bush came close to campus in his 1992 re-election campaign.  He spoke at the nearby train station to an audience of some 15,000.

Photos include, top-bottom, Sen. Thurmond, President Lesesne, and future Vice President George Bush; Thurmond, Lesesne, Bush, Campus Union President Kevin Childs, and Campus Union Vice President Carol Brasington Wilson; and George Bush speaking to the campus community.

Categories
Documents Founders Photographs

Ben’s Big Day

On this day in 1780, 231 years ago, about 15-20 miles south of the present-day Wofford campus in downtown Spartanburg, a baby boy was born to a woman and her Revolutionary War militia captain husband.

The Carolina backcountry was an isolated part of the world in those days, but events from August 1780 to January 1781 in and around the Spartan District would change the young nation’s destiny, confirming American independence from the British Empire.  Other events on the wild frontier over the next 20 years, including the spread of Methodism across the area, would attract numerous Carolinians to the growing church.  The young boy born in October 1780 was drawn, along with the rest of his family, to Methodism, and Benjamin Wofford himself felt called to the ministry.

A few years later, he married, inherited his wife’s family’s considerable wealth,  and after her death in 1835, married again.  Settling into the courthouse village of Spartanburg in the late 1830s, Benjamin and Maria Wofford helped found Central Methodist Church and contemplated the kind of lasting impact that they could make with their accumulated wealth.  Shortly before his death in December 1850, a close friend asked, “Why not found a college?”  In his will of February 1850, Benjamin Wofford did just that.  The child of the frontier, born during a great global war, who as far as I know never traveled further than East Tennessee, laid the foundation for a place of learning that he never saw in operation.  Yet people from all over the world have come here to teach and share, and people have been educated here who have gone out to live and work both locally and globally.  There are Wofford people – his spiritual if not literal descendants, all over the world right now.

Ben may have come out of isolated surroundings, but his gift has gone all around the world.  And for that, today we ought to pause and remember.

Pictured – a pen and ink drawing of founder Benjamin Wofford, prepared by artist W. H. Scarborough.

Categories
Faculty

David Duncan – a Wofford original

David Duncan came a long way to take his chair as Professor of Classical Languages on Wofford’s first faculty.

Duncan, the oldest of Wofford’s original professors, was the only one of the first three professors not to be born in South Carolina – or in the United States.  Born in 1791 in County Armagh, Ireland, his father was both a Presbyterian elder and a Methodist class leader before the Methodist Church became an independent denomination.  Duncan studied at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, and then in 1810, entered the British Navy as a midshipman.  Within a few years, he’d become ship’s purser, on a warship which made him responsible for the ship’s financial affairs.  It was but the first time that he became responsible for maintaining someone’s finances.

He received an offer to become a teacher in a preparatory school in Norfolk, Virginia in 1817, and went, only intending to stay a year.  He never went back to Ireland.  He soon became principal of a classical school, then in 1836, was elected professor of classical languages at Randolph-Macon College in Boydston, Virginia.  There he served under Stephen Olin, the college’s president and a leader in Methodist educational circles, William Wightman, who was the future president of Wofford, and Langdon Garland, who was later chancellor of Vanderbilt University.  No doubt his association with Wightman, who returned to South Carolina and became the leading member of Wofford’s original board of trustees, led to his invitation to join the college’s original faculty.

Duncan was the first of the new faculty to arrive in Spartanburg, and he took the house that is now the Hugh R. Black House as his home.  The Carolina Spartan noted his early arrival, and said that by the time the others had made it to Spartanburg, he and his family had already made themselves at home.  Duncan became the college’s first treasurer, a duty he had also held at Randolph-Macon.  One of the earliest ledgers has information on both Wofford and Randolph-Macon in it – no doubt the thrifty Duncan didn’t want to waste a ledger.

James Carlisle Jr., the son of one of the original professors and third president, made the odd observation that Duncan had a small frame, but a large, well-proportioned head.  He had the habit of keeping the names of everyone in the class in a small box, and when he wanted one of them to read, would shake the box and pull out a name.  Students sometimes found ways to take their name out of the box and thus avoid reciting.

Duncan, at 63, was by far the oldest of the three original professors.  It might be said that his appointment was designed to give some age and seasoning to the faculty.  It is rather amazing that he remained on the faculty and in Spartanburg until his death in 1881.  He had been released from most of his teaching duties when he was 86 years old, which would have been around 1877.  President Carlisle noted that he had fewer of the failings of extreme age – physical, mental, or social – than anybody he had ever known.  He also had one of the best private classical libraries, Carlisle thought, of anybody in the South.

The Duncan family tradition remains with the campus and the city.  Two of his sons were later Wofford trustees.  One of these, William Wallace Duncan, was a minister, a Wofford professor himself, and a Methodist bishop.  His home, now relocated, sits on the campus of the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine in Spartanburg.  The other, David R. Duncan, was an attorney and community leader.  He owned much of the land that became Spartanburg’s Duncan Park, and some of the street names bear the names of family members.

Categories
Buildings Photographs Students

Greene Hall – 60 years and counting

So it turns out, I missed an anniversary last year.

Greene Hall, the oldest residence hall on the campus, turned 60 in the fall of 2010.  For some reason, I convinced myself that the venerable old dorm opened in 1951, but a check of the Walter Kirkland Greene Residence Hall file proved me wrong.

Greene Hall was built to accommodate some of the post-World War II surge in enrollment.  It was one of the few structures called for in the “Wofford of To-Morrow” development campaign that was actually built.  Its construction was approved by the Board of Trustees in October 1949.  One of the larger residences constructed up until that time, it housed 154 students, had a suite for a house mother, and had two small reception rooms.  Its signature space, then and today, was a large lobby with wood floors and a nice fireplace.  When it opened in the fall of 1950, the college had the largest boarding student body in its history.  The trustees named the residence for the sitting president, Dr. Walter K. Greene, class of 1903, in tribute to his leadership of the development campaign.

Its total construction cost was $350,000.  The college didn’t pay off the debt on the building until 1957.

With the construction of Wightman Hall in 1957-58, the area that had been the canteen (the west wing of the basement of Greene) was converted into classrooms and faculty offices.  The building housed offices until the opening of the Daniel Building in 1972.  Some faculty offices remained in the Greene basement for two or three more years.  (Thanks to Dr. Vivian Fisher for the correction!)

Several articles in the Old Gold and Black note the continuing problem with vandalism in Greene during the 1970s.

Constant fire alarms, turning the fire hose on in the lobby, broken windows, ripping doors off of their hinges were making the dorm unlivable.  The college moved to add partitions in the hallways, making them shorter, and also considered making it an all-freshman dorm.  (Remember all of the resident students were men in the early 1970s.)  And, in the fall of 1976, the college let Greene residents loose with gallons of paint, allowing them to make whatever non-structural changes they wished.  The college wanted to make Greene a “different kind of dorm.”  Dorm supervisor Jim Hackney said the results were “better than I expected.”

Greene has had a few other renovations over the years – including adding air conditioning in the late 1980s, and renovating the ground floor “dungeon” into better housing.  But it has always been the most “home-y” of all of the residence halls on campus.

Photos, from top to bottom: Groundbreaking in October 1949, Greene under construction on January 1, 1950, and nearing completion on September 1, 1950.  All photos from the archives. 

 

Categories
Documents

Early Catalogs

I’ve been trying to digitize some of the college’s early catalogs – the document that lists all of the faculty, students, admission requirements, courses, fees, and rules. Once we had some graduates to tout, the catalogs listed those as well, and later versions listed awards, honorary degrees, and other descriptions of the college. Today’s catalogs are fairly long documents, but in the early days, they might run only eight to twelve pages.

Here are a few pages from our first cataog. The rest are available here.