Valdosta State: From Normal School to University

Valdosta sits close enough to the Florida line that on a clear day you might wonder which state you're actually in. The city had grown prosperous on cotton by the turn of the twentieth century, and its civic leaders felt it deserved something more than a county courthouse and a few churches. In nineteen oh six, they lobbied the Georgia Legislature and succeeded in getting a new college established here. They named it South Georgia State Normal College. The word normal, in the educational vocabulary of that era, meant a school for training teachers.

The college was authorized in nineteen oh six but received no actual money until nineteen eleven. When funds finally arrived, the state allocated twenty-five thousand dollars. The city of Valdosta added fifty thousand more, and a local businessman named Colonel W. S. West donated the land that is still the center of campus. The school opened in January of nineteen thirteen as an all-female institution, offering a two-year course in teacher preparation. Its first students were women from across south Georgia who wanted careers in the classroom.

For decades the school reflected the rhythms of the region: conservative, methodical, practically focused. Men were admitted beginning in nineteen fifty, the same year the name changed to Valdosta State College. The college grew with the postwar expansion of public higher education in Georgia, adding departments, dormitories, and degree programs through the nineteen sixties and seventies.

University status came in nineteen ninety-three, when Valdosta State became the second regional university in the state of Georgia. Today it enrolls around eleven thousand students and has professional schools in education, nursing, business, and the arts. The normal school for women that Colonel West helped fund with a land donation has become a comprehensive university serving the southernmost corner of Georgia, a hundred years and more removed from its founding in a cotton-rich county trying to build something that would last.