Wilson College: The College That Refused to Die

Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, has two founding stories, and both of them say something important about who builds things that last.

The first founding happened in eighteen sixty-nine. Two Presbyterian ministers in the Cumberland Valley, Tryon Edwards and James Wightman, believed that women deserved the same quality of education as men, a controversial idea in America at the time. They found support in a woman named Sarah Wilson, a resident of nearby Saint Thomas, Pennsylvania, who made two large donations to establish the institution. Wilson became one of the first women in United States history to endow a college for women. The college named for her opened its doors in October of eighteen seventy.

The second founding happened over a desperate spring in nineteen seventy-nine. On February nineteenth of that year, the Board of Trustees announced that Wilson College would close at the end of the academic year. Declining enrollment and financial pressures, they said, made it impossible to continue. The alumnae of Wilson College disagreed.

In less than three months, alumnae raised one point one million dollars. They also filed suit. On May twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-nine, just two days before what was to have been the last commencement, a Franklin County judge ruled that the Board could not close the college without the court's approval. Wilson stayed open.

The college adopted the phoenix as its mascot afterward, rising from the ashes of a near-death experience. It has since developed strong programs in equine studies, becoming known for an unusual combination of serious academics and one of the finest equestrian training programs in the eastern United States.

On this stretch of the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, two groups of women, separated by a century, built the same institution twice. The one who paid for it in eighteen sixty-nine, and the ones who refused to let it die in nineteen seventy-nine.