Treasures Puts College History On Stage
by Kate Prichard

The original play, Treasures, written by former Mars Hill College Theatre Arts Professor C. Robert Jones, will make its world premiere on Saturday, October 7, at Owen Theatre as a part of the campus Sesquicentennial Celebration.

It is a musical based on happenings at Mars Hill College during the 1890-1891 academic year - a dramatic insight into the lives of staff and students whose actions made the college what it is today.

"You've got a pretty young woman who stood up and told the trustees how to run things…and a very handsome young man who was a former athlete," says Jones. "So you've got to have a romance! So the story becomes Helen and John's story…"

It was a critical year in the college's history, as the trustees were on the verge of closing the doors for good.

Teacher Helen McMaster was young, attractive, and, in 1890, one of the few women with a college degree. She had high standards for the school and challenged the all-male board of trustees to hire a college president who had actually graduated from college.

They responded by hiring a young man in his early twenties, fresh from Wake Forest College, by the name of Thomas Hufham. He was known and admired for his brilliance, and eventually became a mayor of Hickory, N.C.

Hufham in turn brought in John E. White, also a young Wake Forest graduate and a member of the first ever football team there. At the time, ball games were forbidden at Mars Hill College because they tended to get too violent. There was no sports program. After convincing the trustees to give special permission, White organized a baseball team --- the first athletic team at Mars Hill College. He played on the team and was the first to introduce the curve ball to baseball games in the area.

Those are the kernels of history on which Jones bases his fictionalized romance.

"It's a very positive story." says Jones. "It's very uplifting. These are people of substance. These are people who believe strongly about things - and they're not afraid to say it! It's also a glimpse of the college in a more innocent time. We tend to think of the college as it is today, with all these buildings and all this infrastructure. But it was very primitive in those days."

Although they are not well known or well-recognized, the very real characters of Helen McMaster, Thomas Hufham, and John White are people who unpredictably set the college on solid footing. They were quickly forgotten because they were not here long, but Jones hopes that the play will remind us that "there was a Renaissance here in the early 1890s" by young people, not much older than the majority of students here today, who saved the school that many students now call home.

Jones was asked by the school to write the play for the Sesquicentennial celebration --the 150th anniversary of the founding of the college. The idea for the subject came from the book, From These Stones, written by John Angus McLeod, which covers the school's history from 1856 to 1967. However, many of the details about these real-life characters came from extensive detective work on Jones' part.

A second fictionalized romance in the musical involves a student named Willis Morgan, whose real-life story has been handed down in a ballad.

The character of Helen is played by Beverly Todd, who graduated from Mars Hill in 1989. John White is played by Randy Noojin, a SART actor who was seen in the Hank Williams show at Owen Theater last summer. The role of Thomas M. Honeycutt, chairman of the board of trustees, is played by Peter Tamm, an actor from Asheville. Kyle Mason, another Mars Hill grad, plays the part of Thomas Hufham. At least sixteen current Mars Hill students will be appearing in the play as well.

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