Davidson College: Rhodes Scholars and a Basketball Legend

Just off the highway sits a small college with a long shadow. Davidson College was founded in eighteen thirty-seven by the Concord Presbytery, named for General William Lee Davidson, a Patriot officer killed during the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Cowan's Ford, just a few miles west of here. The founders envisioned a manual labor institute, a place where students would work the land alongside their studies.

A single bequest reshaped Davidson's future. In eighteen fifty-six, a Salisbury farmer named Maxwell Chambers left the college two hundred fifty thousand dollars in his will, an extraordinary sum that made Davidson the most heavily endowed institution south of Princeton. It bought permanence in a region where colleges came and went.

Davidson stayed open through the Civil War, one of only two colleges in North Carolina to do so. A young Woodrow Wilson arrived in eighteen seventy-three. He lasted a year before transferring north to Princeton, citing poor health, though the discipline of the place clearly left its mark on a future president who would shape an international order.

Over the decades Davidson produced twenty-three Rhodes Scholars, including Dean Rusk, who served as secretary of state for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson through the most turbulent years of the Cold War. The college punched well above its weight for a school of fewer than two thousand students.

Then in two thousand six a skinny kid from Charlotte walked on campus. Stephen Curry spent three years at Davidson before entering the NBA draft, and in that time he turned a small Presbyterian college into a national story. His forty-point game against Gonzaga in the two thousand eight NCAA tournament is still replayed wherever basketball history is debated. Four NBA championships later, Curry remains the most famous thing to come out of Davidson, North Carolina since General Davidson himself rode off to war.