Davis and Elkins College: Two Senators Build a School

The campus of Davis and Elkins College occupies a hilltop above the city of Elkins, and its origins are written in the name itself. The college was founded in nineteen o four and named for two United States Senators from West Virginia: Henry Gassaway Davis, who served from eighteen seventy-one to eighteen eighty-three and accumulated enormous wealth during the Gilded Age, and his son-in-law Stephen Benton Elkins, who married Davis's daughter Hallie and later served in the Senate himself.

Davis was eighty years old when the college opened, and that same year he was nominated for vice president of the United States on the Democratic ticket. The two men had tried to establish a college in the region and sought a denomination willing to run it. The Presbyterian church eventually took up the offer, and the college took their names.

Elkins today is a small mountain city in Randolph County, and the college sits on land that once formed part of the Davis and Elkins family estate. Several of their historic houses remain on campus, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.