Davidson, North Carolina: The College Town That Shaped a President
North Carolina
The town of Davidson barely existed before the college. In eighteen thirty-five, the Concord Presbytery acquired four hundred and sixty-nine acres on a high ridge in northern Mecklenburg County and set about building a school. The land had been donated by William Lee Davidson II, a local Presbyterian planter whose father, Brigadier General William Lee Davidson, had been killed fighting the British at Cowan's Ford during the Revolution. The college was named for the general; the town that grew up around it took his son's name.
Davidson College opened in eighteen thirty-seven with sixty-four students and two professors. For its first decades it educated the sons of Presbyterian families across the Carolinas, graduating men who went into law, medicine, the ministry, and, increasingly, the Confederacy. The college suspended operations during the Civil War when nearly all its students enlisted.
In the fall of eighteen seventy-three a seventeen-year-old from Staunton, Virginia named Thomas Woodrow Wilson enrolled at Davidson. He stayed one year before his health declined and he returned home, later transferring to what is now Princeton University. Wilson would go on to become the twenty-eighth president of the United States, and his single year at Davidson left its mark. Friends recalled a serious, deeply Presbyterian young man already captivated by oratory and political argument.
The college itself grew steadily. Dean Rusk, who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and helped navigate the Cuban Missile Crisis, graduated from Davidson in nineteen thirty-one. The school became coeducational in nineteen seventy-two.
Today Davidson maintains its small-town character, enrollment under two thousand, and its reputation as one of the most academically rigorous liberal arts colleges in the South. The college and the quiet Main Street are essentially the same thing: Davidson exists because the Presbyterians needed a college, and the college needed Davidson.
