50 Years After Cutting Ties With the Presbyterian Church
Watson Jones | November 3, 2022
In 2023, Warren Wilson College (WWC) will observe 50 years since it cut financial ties with the Presbyterian Church.
The split from the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in 1973 ended a financial and administrative relationship that spanned the better part of a century. The effects of this relationship can still be felt across campus today.
WWC was founded in 1894 — then called the Asheville Farm School— to provide education to young men in the agricultural Swannanoa community and to “modernize and uplift poverty-stricken Southern Appalachia.”
As an outreach effort by a Presbyterian Missionary organization, the Asheville Farm School’s curriculum combined agricultural skills, religious studies and basic education.
Of the 100 applicants in the first year, only 25 were admitted, which was the total capacity of the school at the time. Three years after its start, in 1897, seven of the first admitted students left the school with vocational certificates.
For historical context, these three years witnessed the invention of the X-ray machine, the discovery of radioactivity, the patenting of both Kellogs cereal and the dial telephone. They witnessed Henry Ford debut the first Ford in the streets of the motor city and then, four days later, saw the first recorded car theft.
They also saw the landmark 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case, in which the U.S. Supreme court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, followed by the election of President William McKenley, known for annexing Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
“Few realize the magnitude of our home missionary work,” stated Henry Collin Minton in a 1902 book detailing the activity of the Board of Home Missions. “This Board has planted 5,600 churches, issued 72,721 commissions and expended $23,000,000,” Minton said.
Part of that budget would fund the Asheville Farm School. Around the time of its conception, the farm school ran on a total budget of about $40,000 per year, which included the complete staff salaries, all yearly purchases and maintenance. Adjusted for inflation, in 2022, that number would be around $600,000.
Louis Burch, the highest-paid employee at the time, made an annual $1,200 — a yearly salary of $20,000 in today's money.
Though some income was generated by students working on the farm, most of the funding was provided by the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. This created an inextricably linked relationship between the early Asheville Farm School administration and the Presbyterian Church— a relationship that would remain strong until American cultural shifts in the 1960s sowed the beginnings of an institutional rift between the two parties.
A photo taken of students in the spring of 1895
Because of this, the school attempted to outwardly present a fairly clean and buttoned-up image, both to the Board and to the community.
The students look proper, each with combed hair and formal jackets. It looks like a screen test for an episode of ‘Peaky Blinders’— a sharp cultural contrast to the look of the WWC campus today.
The handwritten Asheville Farm School student register shows a different story; nearly half of the entries dated near the beginning of the school at the turn of the 20th century are accompanied by notes like “expelled for stealing,” “ran away,” “homesick” and “left near Christmas.”
Several short entries list “tobacco” alongside the student's expulsion date from the school, while one simply states “unsatisfied” next to a 20-year-old who came to the school in 1911 and left the next year.
One student, 17 years old, is listed as “drowned” in 1924.
Regardless of the reasons, the school's retention rate for high school-age Appalachian boys was not high.
“The fact that it's Presbyterian does not mean that they came here and were prim and proper,” said Diana Sanderson, the former WWC archivist. “They were pretty wild.”
“They drank, they swore, they smoked,” Sanderson said. “They did everything that we all do. [The school] tried to make them ‘good Christian boys’ and they were just. . . they were not succeeding.”
Despite its Presbyterian affiliation and funding, the school was not entirely — or even a majority — Presbyterian. The first student log lists a roughly equal distribution of Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians, along with a few blank slots and some less common denominations like Waldensians.
Sanderson said that the arrival of the first female students on campus from the Dorland-Bell school initiated a cultural shift that subtly reshaped this rowdy dynamic. The school became more focused on seeking and accepting Presbyterian applicants. Though it had always incorporated Christian teaching, the curriculum reflected an increased focus on religious education.
“I think, you know, many families were more willing to send their girls to a co-ed institution if they knew they were going to all get this religious education,” Sanderson said. “So there was mandatory chapel, there was mandatory Bible study — all that kind of stuff.”
Since its inception, the school’s identity and long-term purpose have been passionately debated — often fueled by the economic highs and lows of both the Appalachian area and the U.S. itself.
A list detailing the rules for students on campus. Not dated.
The school, founded to provide education to farming boys in “poverty-stricken Southern Appalachia,” was in an often confusingly contradictory relationship with the area’s economic progress.
In times of local financial hardship, the school’s mission and identity were seen as vital and integral to the area. In times of economic boon, however, the school struggled to define its own purpose.
The favorable economic conditions of post-WWII America and a strengthening Southern Appalachian school system even pushed members of the board to consider closing the school.
This was not the first school in the area to face closure due to complicated social and economic pressures. The Asheville Normal and Teachers College lost funding from the Board in 1940 and was integrated into the Asheville Farm School.
The school started a “junior college” in 1942, pushed by the wartime need to teach young people practical skills. This junior college, and later, the entire school, was re-named after Warren H. Wilson, a sociologist and member of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, who was passionate about social reform in rural areas.
In the years following, enrollment in WWC’s high school began to wane significantly. Options for schooling in the area were increasing, as were job opportunities, pushing the school to once again look forward and adapt.
In 1956, the first president of WWC — Arthur Bannerman Ph.D — and Henry Jensen Ph.D, the then dean, proposed a plan for a four-year college liberal arts program. This proposal deepened the growing conflict between the school’s Presbyterian past and its uncertain future.
The Presbyterian leadership, which still contributed the majority of the school’s funding, felt that WWC was straying from its initial goal of educating low-income students from Appalachia. They worried that a college program would inevitably draw higher-income students, many of whom would come from far outside the local community.
Class schedules of Asheville Farm School students, detailing Arithmetic, English, Reading and Bible Study courses
After a several-year fight for accreditation, which included physical renovations, curriculum overhaul and the hiring of new teachers and staff, the proposal was approved in 1962.
In 1969, the first four-year college class at WWC graduated with college diplomas.
In the wake of the first liberal arts graduating class, students' opinions on religion began changing more rapidly than ever before in the school's history. The previously slow cultural shifts away from organized religion as a guiding force in community life in the ‘60’s reached a tipping point at WWC in the early 1970’s.
Mandatory chapel attendance — a long-standing tradition of the school since the turn of the century — ended in 1971. Two years later, the Board of National Missions cut off funding to WWC, ending a close working partnership that had been at the helm of every major decision since 1894.
Today, religious leaders on campus do what WWC community leaders have done for its entire history: adapt.
Rev. Dr. Steve Runholt has served as the WWC Minister for 17 years.
He joined WWC in 2005 and holds service every Sunday at the Chapel. Outside of church, he is an active member of the Swannanoa community, fighting for causes like the right for queer people to be ordained into the ministry.
“There's a lot of weird stuff going on in the name of Christianity,” Runholt said, speaking about the role that religion plays in the modern world. “But our church absolutely shares all the same values that the college does — the same commitments to environmental justice, social justice, economic justice and career justice.”
He believes that the church provides a sense of community to those that attend and to the campus as a whole.
“There are people who will sing with you on Sunday when you don’t have the capacity to sing,” Runholt said. “There are people who will pray with you when your heart is broken. Building friendships — I think the church will persist, always, in part, because of that. We’re social creatures. We’re built for community.”
Runholt feels that religious education and theological discussion hold an important role on college campuses regardless of one’s own affiliation or beliefs and provide an important component of liberal arts education.
“However one feels about faith, about organized religion, about institutional faith, about the church — religion is a huge factor . . . a huge component of life on earth,” Runholt said. “Religious tension is a real thing. And, joint interfaith efforts to make peace is a real thing.”
Runholt said that the triad of work, community service and academics that has been the foundation of WWC for many years comes directly from Presbyterian tradition.
“Work, service, learning — that’s as Presbyterian as it gets,” Runholt said.
Rev. Sarah-Grace Montgomery is the youth minister on campus and works alongside Runholt during Sunday service.
She said that though there was a time when religion played a more central role on campus, the college has entered into a time when church service is more of an individual choice.
“To me, the role of religion is a personal preference by each student,” Montgomery said. “For the chapel itself, our role is to be here and available for the students that want to make their way here.”
Like Runholt, Montgomery feels that it is important to have religious resources available to students on college campuses.
“It’s a transitional time in someone's life,” Montgomery said. “The pieces of religion that are comforting, and foundational, are important.”
As the youth minister, she believes her job is to prepare young people to go out into the world through the foundation of the church.
“They know where they can always land,” Montgomery said. “We're here when they need us.”