History
Warren Wilson College went through many phases before becoming what it is today. Its property, situated along the Swannanoa River, was purchased in 1893 by the Women's Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church who were concerned that many Americans in isolated areas were not receiving a proper education and decided to establish church-supported schools in impoverished areas. In 1894 the Asheville Farm School officially opened with 25 boys attending and a professional staff of three offering the first three grades of elementary instruction.
In 1923 the school graduated its first high school class, and the first post-high school programs offering vocational training began in 1936. In 1942, the Asheville Farm School merged with the Dorland-Bell School in Hot Springs, North Carolina, to become a coed secondary school, named Warren H. Wilson Vocational Junior College and Associated Schools, after the late Warren H. Wilson, former superintendent of the Presbyterian Church's Department of Church and Country Life. After World War II, the public education system in North Carolina improved dramatically and the need for the high school diminished with the last high school class there graduating in 1957. Warren Wilson College was a junior college until 1967, when it became a four-year college offering six majors. In 1972, the National Board of Missions deeded the WWC property over to the college's Board of Trustees. William Sanborn "Sandy" Pfeiffer, PhD, began serving as the college's sixth president in July 2006. He has announced his retirement effective in June 2012. He was succeeded July 1, 2012 by Steven L. Solnick, currently the Ford Foundation's representative in New Delhi, India.
In 1952, the college became one of the first in the South to desegregate, when it invited Alma Shippy, an African American from Swannanoa, North Carolina, to attend. The college residents voted 54-1 to allow Shippy to be a student and live in the one dorm on campus at the time. In contrast to its original student population of underprivileged mountain youth, Warren Wilson now enrolls students of many different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
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“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
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—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)