Category: Faculty

In the list of names that we associate with the early faculty of the college, we usually include the likes of William Wightman, Albert Shipp, James Carlisle, Warren DuPre, David Duncan, and Whitefoord Smith. The last four of these served together for much of the 1850s and 1860s, and the first two served portions of that era as the first two presidents. Beginning in 1866, a sixth faculty member joined them, but perhaps because he only stayed seven years, nobody ever remembers his name.

That sixth early faculty member was the Rev. Archibald H. Lester, who served from 1866 to 1873 as professor of history and Biblical Literature. Lester was a Greenville County native, born in 1828. He attended and graduated from Erskine College in 1849, and in 1851, he joined the South Carolina Annual Conference. A series of appointments followed, Pendleton, Union, Cokesbury, Yorkville, Columbia, Cheraw, and in 1860, Spartanburg’s Central Church. Between 1856 and 1865, he married three times, once in November 1856 and once in October 1858, and the final time in 1865.

The five trustees present voted in their July 1866 meeting to establish a sixth faculty position, that of professor of history and Biblical literature, and also to establish a divinity school that President Shipp and the occupant of the new position would run. At the same time, they elected Rev. Lester to that position. When he arrived at Wofford in 1866, he evidently had some personal wealth, and thus, due to the college’s precarious financial position, did not take a salary for teaching.

The divinity school never really materialized beyond the two professors teaching various religious subjects. It’s only speculation, but perhaps the failure of the divinity school to get off the ground led both Lester and Shipp to search for other opportunities. Lester, according to college historian D. D. Wallace, resigned on Dec. 1, 1873 to return to the active ministry. He accepted an appointment that year to serve in Union, which was probably a bigger town then than it is today. Shipp himself left in 1875 to go teach in the new Vanderbilt Divinity School, eventually becoming its dean.

Lester served for over fifteen more years, including four years in Georgetown, before finally leaving the active ministry in 1892. He died in 1897 in Columbia.

Charles Forster Smith had a long and distinguished career as a professor of Greek, and he got his start at Wofford, where he and a new generation of colleagues began to add academic rigor to the college’s curriculum.

Smith, who was not related to Professor Whitefoord Smith, was born in 1852 in Abbeville County, SC, and graduated from Wofford in 1872. His address at commencement was entitled “Unity of Culture.” He then went on to do graduate study at Harvard. While there, he met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in another student’s room, and became convinced that he needed to study abroad. And so, in 1874 and 1875, he ventured to study at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig in Germany. He was evidently the first Wofford graduate to undertake graduate work in Germany.

He returned to Wofford to teach Greek and German in October 1875, in part to relieve the aging Professor David Duncan of some of his Greek courses. He thus, at least as far as I can tell, became the first Wofford graduate to return to teach at the college. He was 23 years old, and had the title “Junior Professor of Greek and German.” The next June, the trustees promoted him to Professor of Ancient Languages and German, four days shy of his 24^th birthday. (However, a few years later, someone would take his place as the youngest full professor in the college’s history by only a few months.)

Smith, wrote D. D. Wallace in his History of Wofford College, was a scholar of a new type at Wofford, and he represented a new generation who wanted to have a thorough university education. The next year, he persuaded the college to bring William M. Baskervill, a Randolph-Macon alumnus who had been with Smith in Germany, to teach Latin, and Baskervill accepted. Wallace also noted that Smith and Baskervill were among those who instituted written examinations in their courses which, Wallace noted “were sometimes quite severe.”

Smith remained at Wofford until 1879, though the catalogue shows him on leave until 1881. During part of that time, he was studying for his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Leipzig, and after that, he taught for a year at Williams College.

Smith, along with Baskervill and James H. Kirkland, went on to teach at Vanderbilt, where all three taught a young Henry Nelson Snyder. Snyder wrote of the influence each of them had on his education and on his career, having studied Latin, Greek, and English with the three German-educated PhD’s. No doubt they encouraged Snyder to come to Wofford, and he was certainly following in their footsteps when he ventured to Germany to work on his PhD after a few years at Wofford.

In 1894, The University of Wisconsin came calling, and Smith journeyed north to head the Greek department in Madison. He remained there until 1917, but maintained friendships and connections in South Carolina.

Of the generation of faculty that taught at Wofford in the first half of the 20^th century, Dr. William Leonard Pugh seems less well-remembered than some of his colleagues. Perhaps his quieter demeanor kept him in the shadows of other faculty, for unlike most of the others of his era, he didn’t have a nickname. He shared the English department in this era with the college’s president. Henry Nelson Snyder, so that may also account for his lower profile.

William Leonard Pugh was born in 1874 near Lenox, Iowa. He graduated from Parsons College, a Presbyterian-related college in Iowa, in 1897. He later earned an MA at Parsons in Latin and Greek, and taught those subjects at the preparatory school he had attended before college. He was a high school principal and later superintendent of schools in Corydon, Iowa from 1902 to 1907. Later, he continued his education at Northwestern, where he earned another MA in 1908, this one in English, and at Harvard, where he completed his PhD in English in 1911. He joined the Wofford faculty in the fall of 1911, becoming one of a quartet of doctoral-degree holding professors. Drs. Wallace, Waller, and Chiles were the other early PhD-holders in the 20^th century.

In 1954, Dr. Pugh recalled how he came to Wofford and Spartanburg, places he’d never heard of before a telegram arrived from one of his doctoral advisers telling him to go South. The professor made favorable remarks about President Snyder, that he was a fine English scholar and that it would be good for the Midwesterner to learn something about the South. So, with only a few weeks before the start of school, in August 1911, Pugh and his wife packed their suitcases and traveled on the train to South Carolina, expecting to stay just one year before going elsewhere. But, once Dr. Snyder met the Pughs at the train station and showed them such warm hospitality, the Pughs later recalled that they fell in love with the campus. They also enjoyed the warm winters on top of the warm hospitality. Pugh did later report that once the students arrived that fall, he had to learn a separate set of names, as he started hearing the student nicknames for professors.

Interestingly, and perhaps a little unusually for early 20^th century Spartanburg, Dr. Pugh’s wife was also Dr. Pugh – but in her case, she was a physician. Dr. Ruth Frank Pugh served for a number of years as the college physician at Converse College, and had been a Presbyterian medical missionary in India.

Dr. Pugh became active in Spartanburg’s First Presbyterian Church, showing that not all members of the faculty had to be Methodists. He was a Sunday school teacher in the church for many years, and a ruling elder of the church from 1919 until his death in 1957.

Students remembered that Dr. Pugh talked like he had a mouthful of marbles. He hammered his points across in lectures until students got them. He was known for his lectures, parallel reading, and homework. One student remembered writing mounds of themes for Dr. Pugh. Students also knew him for riding a bicycle to campus and around town, very stiffly, they recalled. Later, he had a Saxon roadster automobile – one of the many different types of automobiles in those early days of car manufacturing. He was regarded as a reserved, dignified, and somewhat aloof professor. He retired with a large group of longtime professors in 1947, when the college instituted an age limit for serving as a professor. He remained in Spartanburg for just over ten more years, dying in August 1957 in the town he’d arrived in 46 years before, intending only to stay one year.