Huntingdon College

Huntingdon College was chartered on February 2, 1854, as "Tuskegee Female College" by the Alabama State Legislature and Governor John A. Winston. The first president was Andrew Adgate Lipscomb. Dr. Lipscomb laid the foundation of the college as a teaching college rather than a research institution. In 1872 the name was changed to "Alabama Conference Female College" as the college came under the auspices of the United Methodist Church. As the college and the South struggled to rebuild following the Civil War, it became clear to college leaders that growth and stability were dependent upon relocation to a more populous city—and they chose the state's capital. A 58-acre (235,000 m²) parcel of land on what was then the outskirts of town and is now the beautiful Old Cloverdale neighborhood of Montgomery was selected in 1908. The design for the landscape of the campus was provided by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who had also planned the Biltmore Estate. The college, renamed once again to "Woman's College of Alabama," moved all of its furniture, lab chemicals, and records into Hamner Hall in Montgomery August 24, 1909, but the building burned to the ground that night, destroying the records of the college's first 50 years and all of its belongings. As the students and President William Martin moved to Sullins College in Virginia for that school year, construction continued on the college's first building, John Jefferson Flowers Memorial Hall. Completed in 1910 and designed by Harvard architect H. Langford Warren, Flowers Hall was designed to emulate the collegiate Gothic architecture of Oxford and Cambridge, England, and of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and set the tone for the pervasive architectural style of campus buildings henceforth.