Longwood University
Longwood University is a public university in Farmville, Virginia. Founded in 1839 as Farmville Female Seminary and colloquially known as Longwood or Longwood College, it is the third-oldest public university in Virginia and one of the hundred oldest institutions of higher education in the United States. Previously a female seminary, normal school, and college, Longwood became coeducational in 1976 and gained university status on July 1, 2002.
Former names
Farmville Female Seminary
(1839–1860)
Farmville Female College
(1860–1875)
Farmville College
(1875–1884)
State Female Normal School
(1884–1914)
State Normal School for Women (1914–1924)
State Teachers College
(1924–1949)
Longwood College
(1949–2002)
Docemus Docere (Latin)
"We Teach To Enlighten"
March 5, 1839[1]
$90.5 million[2]
Katharine M. Bond ’98[4]
5,096
4,574
522
Remote town, 154 acres (0.62 km2)
The Rotunda
Blue and white[5]
Elwood
Three undergraduate academic colleges—the Cook-Cole College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Business and Economics, and the College of Education and Human Services—supported by the Cormier Honors College and coupled with the College of Graduate and Professional Studies serve an enrollment of 5,096.
In early April 1865 both Gens. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant marched past the north end of campus on Lee's retreat to Appomattox just days before the end of the American Civil War;[6] at the south end of campus lies the former Robert Russa Moton High School, site of the historic 1951 student strike that became one of the five court cases culminating in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision;[7] and Israel Hill, a community of free African Americans that formed around the turn of the 19th century,[8] stands two miles from campus.
History[edit]
Early history (1839–1884)[edit]
Longwood was founded in 1839 as the Farmville Female Seminary Association. Led by Solomon Lea, a Methodist minister who had taught at Randolph–Macon College, the school flourished. Lea left to become the first president of Greensboro Female Seminary (now Greensboro College) in his native North Carolina, and several presidents and name changes followed in the subsequent decades. Led by a number of Methodist ministers, the school offered English, Latin, Greek, French, and piano.[9]
As was common among female seminaries during Reconstruction, Farmville Female College, as the institution was then known, fell into a period of deep financial difficulty. The decade following the Civil War saw many seminaries around the South shutter their doors. The college was given new life on June 5, 1875, with a new charter granted and the college renamed Farmville College. Rev. Paul Whitehead, a minister from nearby Nelson County, Virginia who had been president of Wesleyan Female College at Murfreesboro, N.C., was appointed president. Under Whitehead, enrollment grew by nearly half, topping 100 students in 1876. Whitehead resigned in 1872 to return to full-time ministry.[9]
Normal School (1884–1949)[edit]
Farmville College was reinvented once again on March 7, 1884, as the State Female Normal School—the brainchild of Dr. William Henry Ruffner, the first Virginia State Superintendent of Instruction.[10] Modeled after the French École normale supérieure, which had been developed in the late 18th century as a model for teacher preparation, the State Female Normal School is one of the oldest of several normal schools in the state.
In 1902, Joseph L. Jarman was named president of the State Female Normal School, a post that lasted an astounding forty-four years. Jarman reshaped the physical campus from a single Victorian structure to a row of colonnaded Jeffersonian brick buildings that forms the core of today's campus. The academic program was also overhauled: the two-year teacher training program that had been in place since the college's founding was replaced with a four-year college academic program with permission to grant degrees. Jarman instituted the Honor Code, which survives to this day, and the student government. Through still several name changes—State Female Normal School (1884), State Normal School for Women (1914) and State Teachers College (1924)—Jarman shaped the institution into one of the most well-respected teacher preparatory colleges in the state.[11]
During Jarman's presidency, the college purchased in 1928 the nearby estate of the Longwood House, which would become the namesake of the institution in years to come.[12]