From seminary to college
Eliza Baylies Chapin Wheaton played an ongoing role in the life of the seminary. In the mid-1890s, she was among the first to recognize that the age of the seminary was ending. Four-year colleges were becoming the rule rather than the exception, for women as well as men. (Indeed, seminary enrollment in 1897 was a mere 25 students.) Convinced that Wheaton should seek collegiate status, Mrs. Wheaton called upon trustees to appoint one of their own, the Reverend Samuel Valentine Cole, as the seminary’s first president. Within six months of assuming the position, President Cole announced his intention to seek a college charter “at some future time if circumstances shall seem to warrant.”
So began a massive revitalization project that resulted in an expanded and strengthened curriculum and an almost entirely new campus. The effect of these improvements was dramatic: By 1899–1900, Wheaton’s enrollment had more than tripled. In November 1911, trustees announced their decision to apply for a college charter, which was granted by the Massachusetts Legislature in February 1912.
The first half of the 20th century brought further expansion. In planning the physical development of Wheaton’s campus, President Cole consulted with well-known Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram as early as 1897. Cram’s pencil sketch of a “Court of Honor”—a rectangular, open space surrounded by groups of buildings based on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago—became a blueprint for campus development; a gymnasium, a power house, a chapel, four dormitories, a library dining hall, a science building and an observatory were constructed between 1900 and 1925. Ralph Adams Cram would later become supervising architect at Princeton, Rice, MIT and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Following Samuel V. Cole’s death in 1925, the Reverend John Edgar Park became Wheaton’s second president. He began his tenure by modernizing the curriculum. Among his accomplishments: introducing departmental honors and senior seminars, instituting a system of academic majors and minors, and establishing a Wheaton chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. The year 1935 brought Wheaton’s centennial anniversary, which the college commemorated with a two-day celebration that included commencement, alumnae reunions, historical exhibits, and the performance of a pageant written by English department members Ellen Ballou and Louise Barr MacKenzie. Student enrollment and the size of the faculty increased steadily during Dr. Park’s presidency, and new construction continued, including the Student Alumnae Building (1940), the first Modern building on an American college campus. Wheaton’s growth and vitality during these years is particularly noteworthy in the context of two major world events: the Great Depression and World War II.