Hope College — This Is My Anchor of Hope

When Albertus van Raalte founded the Pioneer School in Holland in eighteen fifty one, four years after the kolonie was established, he described his reasoning in a sentence that stuck: this is my anchor of hope for this people in the future. The school began as a primary academy in a log building. It grew into a preparatory school, then into a college, and in eighteen sixty six received its state charter as Hope College.

The name was Van Raalte's own. He borrowed the image of an anchor from the biblical Letter to the Hebrews and from his own conviction that the community he was building needed educated leaders to survive. He was not interested in creating a liberal arts college in the abstract sense. He was interested in training ministers and teachers for the Dutch Reformed community of western Michigan.

Hope College today is a selective liberal arts college of more than three thousand students, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. Its campus occupies the same central blocks of Holland that the Pioneer School once stood on, surrounded by faculty houses and student buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Van Raalte is buried in Pilgrim Home Cemetery a few blocks from campus. The college that he believed would hold his community together outlasted him by a century and a half and is still holding.