Elon University: The Hebrew Oak and the Ashes That Rebuilt It

The word Elon comes from the Hebrew for oak, a tree known for putting down roots that outlast the storms above them. The founders who chose that name in eighteen eighty-nine probably did not anticipate how literally they would be tested.

The Southern Christian Conference of North Carolina chartered Elon College that year and decided to build it at Mill Point, a small railroad stop in Alamance County about five miles from Burlington. The first president, William S. Long, sold his own family farm to fund construction of the original main building. Seventy-six students arrived on September second, eighteen ninety, making Elon one of the first colleges in the South to open its doors to both men and women from the start.

For three decades, the college grew steadily. Then, in the early morning hours of January eighteenth, nineteen twenty-three, fire broke out and consumed the main building entirely, classrooms, faculty offices, the library, the administrative heart of the institution, all gone before dawn. The board gathered in the ashes and voted immediately to rebuild. Five new buildings, a library, an auditorium, and three classroom structures, rose within about two years. The oak held.

Through the twentieth century, Elon built a reputation as a teaching-focused liberal arts college, and its communications and performing arts programs in particular attracted national recognition. Among its alumni: Grant Gustin, who would go on to star as Barry Allen in The Flash on television. In two thousand one, the board of trustees voted to elevate the institution to university status, formally becoming Elon University as enrollment surpassed four thousand students.

Today the campus anchors the small town that grew up around it, a town that took its own name from the college in eighteen ninety-three. The oak and the town are, in the end, the same thing.