Samford University
Near Birmingham, Alabama
On the slopes of Shades Valley in suburban Birmingham, a sprawling red-brick campus marks the home of Samford University, one of the oldest and most storied Baptist institutions in the American South.
The school began in eighteen forty-one, when the Alabama Baptist State Convention chartered Howard College in the town of Marion, naming it after John Howard, an eighteenth-century English prison reformer whose work the Baptists admired. Those first years were precarious. Marion was a small town in the Alabama Black Belt, and the college grew slowly. Then the Civil War came. The campus at Marion was disrupted, enrollment collapsed, and the college struggled through Reconstruction with limited resources.
In eighteen eighty-seven, Howard College made the decision that would define its future: it followed the rising industrial city of Birmingham, relocating its faculty of six and its students to the East Lake neighborhood on the city's eastern edge. Birmingham was booming on iron and steel, and the college grew with it. By nineteen thirteen, the school had formally become coeducational, catching up with the women who had been admitted provisionally since the eighteen nineties.
In nineteen sixty-one, Howard College acquired the Cumberland School of Law from Cumberland University in Tennessee, adding legal education to its offerings and planting the seed of what would become one of the South's most respected law schools. A third campus move in nineteen fifty-seven brought the university to Shades Valley, where it sits today.
The final name change came because of geography: Howard University already existed in Washington, in that case as the nation's most prominent historically Black university. So in honor of Frank Park Samford, a loyal trustee and insurance executive who had chaired the board, Howard College became Samford University. Today it enrolls roughly six thousand students and houses eleven academic schools, including the Cumberland School of Law and a pharmacy school ranked among the nation's best.
