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.
As the Army emerged from World War I, it recognized the need for a larger number of reserve officers who it could call to active duty in an emergency or in a future war. The concept had its roots in the practices of many land-grant colleges, many of which were organized as a corps of cadets, and from Norwich University in Vermont, which was founded with the idea of producing citizen-soldiers. The National Defense Act of 1916 authorized granting commissions to college graduates who had taken an appropriate course of study and had qualified to serve as officers. Wofford’s quick acceptance of the wartime SATC made requesting an ROTC presence on campus seem to be an obvious choice. The faculty adopted the required courses in military science and tactics, creating a department that would be staffed by Army officers. The college received the orders creating a senior college ROTC unit on December 28, 1919.
The end of World War I brought a quick end to the militarization of Wofford’s student body. Here are a few letters from President Snyder relative to the college’s desire to start a training corps, and an article from The Wofford College Journal that attests to the lack of sadness among the students when SATC ended.
American entry into World War I in April 1917 saw the Army begin to scramble to find enough trained officers. Many Wofford students and alumni entered military service directly, and President Henry Nelson Snyder put the college on a more military footing as soon as the United States entered the war. In 1918, the college organized the student body into a Student Army Training Corps to provide military training to almost every student. The SATC dominated life on campus through the remainder of World War I. When the war ended, the student body quickly reverted to civilian control. The success of the SATC set the stage for the creation of ROTC in 1919.
This is the first in a multi-part series featuring photos and documents from the library’s Spring 2020 exhibit on 100 years of ROTC at Wofford. Today’s post is more back-story, as it is included to show that the college had a military tradition before ROTC, and also to show where the ROTC unit got its name.
While ROTC got its start at Wofford in 1919, a large number of Wofford students and young alumni served in earlier wars. In 1860, Wofford students formed themselves into a militia unit to prepare for war, but South Carolina’s governor Francis Pickens requested they remain in school until needed. After the first shots of the war were fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, many students began to leave to join militia companies in their home towns. The college gave members of the senior class their diplomas, but the students had to promise to return to college to complete their senior year if the war was short. It was not, and they did not.
The first Wofford alumnus to die in military service was William Maxwell Martin, a member of the class of 1857. His 1857 Commencement address, The Calico Flag, caused a sensation in the audience, according to observers. After South Carolina’s secession, he volunteered and was sent to guard Charleston Harbor, at Fort Moultrie. On the night of January 31, he stood guard by his cannon on a cold, damp night and as a result, he caught a chill. His illness led to hospitalization, and he died three weeks later, on Feb. 21, before hostilities began. His volume of poetry, Lyrics and Sketches, was published after his death.
We are living in unprecedented times, that’s for sure.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, most of us at Wofford are working from home. We’ve taken an extra few weeks of spring break as we figure out how to adjust to some new realities on campus and in our world. And the library is not immune to those new realities.
It’s been quite a few months since I posted anything on the From the Archives blog, partly because of our library’s three-phase renovation, partly because of the press of other duties. We’ve spent much of this semester getting the college and Methodist collection moved to our new location, and I hope to be able to share some information about our brand new archives and special collections suite soon. It’s really an incredible facility and we’re going to enjoy working in there for years to come. But that move is mostly responsible for my blog silence for the past few months.
This spring, we have an exhibit on the centennial of ROTC at Wofford in the library gallery. Since nobody is really going to be able to come see it in person, I am planning to share its contents here on the blog over the next few weeks. So, stay tuned, and I’ll be sharing as much of it as I can/. Also, I’m going to do a little research on how Wofford handled the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, so watch for that as well.
The alumni office brought me a gift recently – not for me, of course, but for the collection.
The gift came from the family of Charles G. Furr, who was, as his family noted, a proud 1954 Wofford graduate. While a student, he was a member of Delta Sigma Phi fraternity, served on the Interfraternity Council, and was on the staffs of all three student publications – the Bohemian, Old Gold and Black, and The Journal.
His family sent us a Wofford letter sweater that he received as a cheerleader, as well as one of his Delta Sigma Phi t-shirts. Since I haven’t posted much lately, it seemed like a nice gift to celebrate on the 65th anniversary of his graduation from Wofford.
Mrs. Maria Davies Wightman lived in several states, but she became one of the most prominent women in South Carolina Methodism as the founding president of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the South Carolina Conference. Given how the organizations have evolved, she stands first in the line of women to have led the conference’s women’s organization.
Born in 1833 in the home of her great-grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran of the Siege of Yorktown, Maria Davies moved as a small child first to Montgomery, Alabama, then to Macon, Mississippi. She graduated first in her class in 1849 from Centenary Institute in Summerfield, Alabama.
During the Civil War, her family moved to Greensboro, Alabama, where Southern University was located. A South Carolina clergyman named William Wightman was serving as the university’s chancellor, having left Wofford College in 1859 to help start the new university. (This college eventually became Birmingham-Southern.) In 1862, Maria Davies met Wightman, who was a widower with 5 children. Despite a 25-year age difference, they married in November 1863.
In 1866, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South elected William Wightman a bishop, and the Wightmans moved to Charleston, Bishop Wightman’s home, to establish his episcopal residence. Bishop Wightman traveled throughout the country to preside over Annual Conferences, and Mrs. Wightman found herself busy supporting the bishop and raising their two children.
And here began Mrs. Wightman’s involvement with missionary society work. Women in Methodism had wanted to organize some type of women’s work in the church for years but had been discouraged by the church hierarchy. In 1878, the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South was approved by General Conference and a constitution prepared by the College of Bishops. On May 23, 1878, the society was organized, and plans soon made to establish societies in each Annual Conference.
The bishops appointed the initial officers of the church-wide society, and the eight bishops’ wives became vice presidents. Mrs. Wightman helped organize the society and she suggested that each Annual Conference should also have a society. When the South Carolina Conference met in November 1878 in Newberry, the conference missionary secretary invited any interested women to meet to form a society. Mrs. Wightman was asked to preside. The nominating committee recommended her for the presidency of the conference Woman’s Missionary Society, and she was elected. Some sources have suggested that she was the first woman to preside over a public meeting in the history of South Carolina.
Mrs. Wightman remained as president of the conference Woman’s Missionary Society after Bishop Wightman died in 1882, and for thirty more years, until her own death in 1912. Many of the articles in her papers testify to the strength and resolve she brought to her position, for she was intent on supporting women who wanted to serve the church. When the conference society held its first annual meeting at Trinity Church, Charleston in April 1880, she addressed the assembled members as to why they were not holding their state meeting during Annual Conference. “At this time, we have, all to ourselves, two days for consultation, for reports, suggestions, for united, specific, continuous prayer, and an opportunity to see our duty and our privilege, that our lives may take a deeper meaning and purpose.” Had they met during Conference, they would have felt like a side show.
She concluded her address, “We need faithful, willing hearts and hands for service… I say to each of you, my sisters, your hand is wanted. The Lord has need of you.” And so, Mrs. Maria Wightman spent the next thirty years organizing the missions work of South Carolina’s Methodist women.
This February 23, The Delta chapter of Kappa Alpha, at Wofford College, celebrates its 150th birthday.
Kappa Alpha traces its origins to Washington and Lee, though like all secret societies, the founders were more concerned with getting their organization going than they were documenting the history they were making. But, the fraternity was founded there between late 1865 and early 1866. For anyone interested, a recent history of the fraternity by historian Martin Clagett, Excelsior, will give you all the details. Within a few years, the early founders had decided their group needed to expand. In the spring of 1868, the Alpha chapter authorized members to establish a “lodge of our order” at Virginia Military Institute and the University of Georgia. Very soon thereafter, an opportunity arose to establish a lodge at Wofford.
A South Carolinian named William A. Rogers had attended Washington College in 1867-68, desiring to study under Washington College’s president, who happened to be Robert E. Lee. Rogers was initiated into Kappa Alpha while at Washington College, but returned to his native state in the fall of 1868. According to campus legend, he came with a letter of recommendation from Lee. He joined the freshman class at Wofford in October 1868. He soon communicated his desire to establish a chapter in Spartanburg, and in November, the Alpha granted him permission to organize a chapter. Rogers, according to the Alpha chapter minutes, had recruited several interested members. Clagett’s history notes that “On February 23, 1869, in a rented room of the old Evans residence on Church Street, four members were initiated into the lodge.” These four members, William A. Rogers, Edwin W. Peeples, Hope H. Newton, and Lawrence D. Hamer then organized Delta Chapter. Peeples and Newton were seniors and Hamer was a junior. These four then elected John Woods as a member. The Alpha chapter soon sent the bylaws and charter to the Delta chapter.
Delta chapter grew, though Clagett notes that the Alpha chapter waned somewhat after the founding generation left. Rogers, as the grand master of the Delta chapter, went about organizing a strong chapter and recruiting good brothers. Two of them were politically (in Wofford terms) well connected. One was John Wesley Shipp, the son of the president of the college, and another was Joseph Augustus Gamewell, the son of a founding trustee. Gamewell, a member of the class of 1871, came back to join the faculty in 1875, a position he retained for 65 years. In the fall of 1869, Shipp succeeded Rogers as Grand Master of the chapter.
Kappa Alpha has been a consistent presence at Wofford for 150 years. Several other fraternities quickly joined them on campus – Chi Psi came later in 1869, and Chi Phi came in 1871. Those two did not come back after the early 1900s, when the college banned fraternities for about ten years. Banning the fraternities did not do away with them, it just forced them underground. One interesting moment in the early 20th century was when about 9 students were initiated sub rosa by the chapter at the College of Charleston. When the college learned of their misdeeds, they expelled all of them. Those students all enrolled at Trinity in North Carolina, where they all graduated. Eventually, Wofford relented, granting them their degrees some twenty years later. The faculty and trustees realized that banning secret societies was ultimately a fruitless, pointless endeavor and allowed them to return in 1915. That’s why the Kappa Alpha chapter actually has two charters – one from 1869, and another from 1915.
Their original 1869 charter makes Kappa Alpha the oldest currently existing student organization on campus.
Another in a fairly short list of professors who served but a short time at Wofford in the early days was Professor Frank C. Woodward.
A Virginia native, Woodward graduated from Randolph-Macon College, a Methodist institution in Virginia that is older than Wofford. After graduation, he followed his father into the Methodist ministry in Virginia. But, he had been trained in some of the more scholarly methods of teaching English and languages, and despite having no advanced degrees, in 1881 Wofford called upon him to teach French and Latin. A year later, the college gave him the English chair that Dr. William M. Baskervill had vacated to go to Vanderbilt. He lived in the house on the eastern end of the row of faculty homes formerly occupied by David Duncan, and later occupied by J. A. Gamewell. That house is now the wellness center.
Woodward continued Baskervill’s teaching style in the English courses enthusiastically. He taught for a total of seven years at Wofford before, in 1888, the faculty at South Carolina College called him to join their ranks as professor of English language, literature, and rhetoric.
He was destined for higher office. In 1897, the trustees made him president of South Carolina College. An interesting point there is that the faculty in the 1880s and early 1890s had two members who went on to presidencies at much larger places, Woodward as well as John C. Kilgo, who went to Trinity as president in 1894.
After USC, Woodward went to the University of Richmond to teach English. It’s hard to say what impact he had on Wofford these 130 years later, but he was one in a series of faculty who spent a few years helping to improve teaching and scholarship, who worked alongside a core of faculty who stayed for many more years.