The brief history of the Sylva Collegiate Institute
For a young Carden and freinds, kudzu fields offered endless opportunities for imagination. File photo
Back in the 1940s, while World War II was still raging in Europe and the Philippines, Charlie Kilpatrick and I used to entertain ourselves by prowling through the kudzu thickets near his house.
On the knoll where the water tower is now, we used to come across concrete footings and buried bricks which we believed were the debris of either a secret outpost of the Nazis or “The sons of Nippon” that we knew about from the latest film down at the Ritz and we would crawl through the kudzu and the briars with our Daisy air rifles pretending to be Jimmy Cagney and Brian Donlevy on a secret mission. Of course, we knew that this was really the site of the Sylva Collegiate Institute, which was some kind of school, but when you are James Cagney and armed with a Daisy, there is nothing very interesting about that.
But now, 80 years later, I find myself fascinated by what used to be known as College Hill because there was a college located there. With the help of Jason Brady, who is now in charge of special collections at Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library, I have been able to conjure up a vital picture of a part of Sylva’s history — a time when 250 students came and went on the streets of our town, moving from their classes to their rooms.
Many were day students who traveled to the Sylva Collegiate Institute each day. Jason provided me school catalogs that listed the names of students who traveled from communities like Bushnell, Proctor and Japan — communities that were later erased by Fontana Lake.
SCI opened its doors in 1898. It operated “independently” until 1900. In the beginning, the school’s financial support was derived from a number of local citizens who felt the need for better educational advantages.
Basically, that means that a significant number of the community felt that the existing school system was incapable of providing an education that would qualify its students to attend college.
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Specifically, that meant that colleges were rejecting the majority of students who graduated from the local school system. “Institutes” were established to respond to this need.
Training at Institutes was comparable to a modern high school education, and their mission was to bridge the gap between public schools and the colleges. The major emphasis in most of these institutions was on agriculture, business, music and stewardship. In 1900, the Baptist Home Mission Society launched its program of aid to mountain schools in North Carolina. As a result, the Sylva Collegiate Institute was one of eight schools that received benefits from this appropriation. There were institutes in Haywood, Fruitland in Henderson County and one short-lived institute in Murphy. Mars Hill College began operation as Mars Hill Institute. When all of these schools accepted support from the Baptist Home Mission, they automatically became “Baptist schools.”
Acceptance of funding from the Baptist Home Mission Society was such that each school’s curriculum had an emphasis on religion. Although other fields were taught, most students at SCI were pre-ministerial students. The Society’s funding enabled the Sylva institute to construct a five-room brick building and a girl’s dorm with thirteen rooms. All of the classes were conducted in the five-room brick building.
In the beginning, the majority of male students lived in Sylva or commuted from nearby communities. By 1905, SCI’s enrollment was 195 students. The school very nearly operated at no expense to the students since all charges were at a minimum due to the generous support of the Baptist Home Missions. According to a pamphlet, The Mountain School Work of the Home Mission Board by J. W. O’Hara, SCI increased its facilities to include an administrative building, two dormitories and a cottage. However, in 1924 the cottage burned shortly its construction and one student lost his life.
At that time the Institute employed ten teachers with an enrollment of 229 students. It is interesting to note that in its prospering years, SCI exceeded Western Carolina Teachers College and had plans to become a junior college. Any plans that the Institute had for future growth were dashed by three events.
First, North Carolina Public Schools began a program to establish a high school system with levels or grades. Previously, this had been the primary purpose of SCI. Students were not likely to pay for a high school education when it could be acquired at no cost in the public schools.
Then, when the great Depression struck the school system, enrollments dropped in all of the institutes.
Finally, the Baptist Home Mission Society withdrew their funds. The withdrawal of these funds brought on the collapse of the Institute, although the Board of Trustees and several prominent citizens attempted to keep the doors open for a short time.
Additional “financial problems” brought about the permanent closing of the school. During the annual meeting in June 1931, the Home Mission Board “dissociated itself” as the operating agents of the mountain schools. SCI ceased to be an educational institution. All of the buildings were torn down shortly afterwards.
As a teenager, I talked to several Sylva residents of SCI who had pleasant memories of the school. Velt Wilson, the owner of Velt’s Café, showed me his yearbook and the Special Collections Section at WCU has a fascination collection of photographs of the SCI buildings. I noted that a number of the photographs belonged to familiar names: Rachael Phillips, Doris Beck and Willa Scruggs.
Brady, Director of Special Collections brought all of this material together. I am fascinated by the fact that Sylva “almost” became a college town. Had it survived I wonder what effect it would have had on Western Carolina Teachers College, now Western Carolina University, and the growth of community colleges in this region.
(Gary Carden is one of Southern Appalachia’s most revered literary figures and has won a number of significant awards for his books and plays over the years, including the Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers Association in 2001, the Brown Hudson Award for Folklore in 2006 and the North Carolina Arts Council Award for Literature in 2012. His most recent book, “Stories I lived to tell,” is available at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, or online through uncpress.org.)
