Monmouth College - Ravelings Yearbook (Monmouth, IL)

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Monmouth College. N educational institution ' s growth maybe traced along various lines. You may measure this growth by the increase in its student body from year to year; you may measure it by the broadening of its influence through an increasing number of alumni and a widening circle of friends: you may measure it again by noting the gradual enrichment and strengthening of its courses of study. Measured by any of these standards, Monmouth College has grown and is continuing to grow. There is still another way of reading her history, however, and that is as we find it written in the build- ings that have housed her. It is the building question that confronts Monmouth to-day. Wherever she is known and loved, her friends are thinking buildings and talking buildings. The disastrous fire of last November has decreed that it must be so. One will be forgiven, therefore, if in writing a historical sketch he deals only with the earthly house of this tabernacle. Monmouth College and the houses in which she has lived might in- deed be a better caption for this article. In April 1853, Monmouth was selected as the home of a newly-born school which had not yet been bap- tized Monmouth College. N. A. Rankin, E. C. Babcock and James Thompson were appointed a building committee to provide a dwelling place for the infant institution. A building site was donated by A. C. Harding in the western part of the city, on what is now A Street between Detroit and Euclid. Some three years elapsed, however, before the building could be finished. During this time, Monmouth Academy, as it was then called, boarded around For a time a home was found in the Christian church, located on the present site of the city scales on North 1st Street. A little later a move was made to the basement of the Presbyterian church, which stood where the Opera House now stands. In 1856 Monmouth Academy was raised to the rank of a college and camped for a few weeks in an old, one-room, district school which occupied the present site of the Y- M C. A building This school house was afterward moved to the corner of Archer and B Streets, where it still does service as a dwelling. In October of 1856, the new building on the lot donated by General Harding was finished and the tenant life of Monmouth College came to an end. For seven years this building served as her only home. From it the five classes from ' 58 to ' 62 were graduated. In April 1859, A. Y. and David Graham offered ten acres of the present campus as a new buildm g site on condition that a suitable brick or stone building should be com- menced by Sept. 1st, 1861, and fin- ished within three years there a f t er. The proposition i ■ f . t i •,, • • •■ ■ » 3 Jo, ,a .: A - '