Henry Hardin Cherry and the Hill He Built

On a hill south of downtown Bowling Green, a man named Henry Hardin Cherry spent more than four decades building a university from a struggling private school into one of Kentucky's major public institutions. Cherry was born in eighteen sixty-four and became a schoolteacher and educational reformer who believed deeply in the power of public teacher training to transform rural communities. In eighteen ninety-two, when the private Southern Normal School in Bowling Green was on the verge of closing, Cherry and his brother purchased it and reorganized it.

He rebuilt it steadily over the next decade, advocating loudly in the Kentucky legislature for the creation of state-funded teacher training institutions. His campaign succeeded. On the twenty-first of March, nineteen oh six, the Kentucky General Assembly passed legislation establishing two normal schools, and a locating commission chose Bowling Green as the site of one of them.

The new Western State Normal School took over Cherry's Southern Normal School building and student body. Cherry became its first president. Classes began on the twenty-second of January, nineteen oh seven.

He ran the institution for thirty years through two world wars and the Great Depression, overseeing its growth from a teacher-training program into a comprehensive state university. It eventually became Western Kentucky University in nineteen sixty-six. Cherry died on the first of August, nineteen thirty-seven, and is buried on the campus hilltop he spent his life developing.

His motto for the institution appears on its seal: the spirit makes the master. Western Kentucky University now enrolls more than twenty thousand students and is the largest employer in Bowling Green.