"As a labor of love for a very special place," three alumni have created a pictorial history of Mars Hill College in their new book Through the Long Years.

On the occasion of the college's 150th anniversary, Darryl Norton, Robert Chapman, and Walter Smith have put together a 206-page coffee table size book that includes 850 annotated photographs.

An inscription from a 1980s-era yearbook describes its mission: "Memories are pictures taken by the heart to make a special moment last forever."

The book presents memories of Mars Hill and the people associated with it from its conception in 1856 to the present.

A year and a half ago Norton, director of auxiliary services for the college, approached his former professor, Robert Chapman, to help him put together a pictorial book of Mars Hill. In addition to teaching, Chapman worked 44 years at Mars Hill in administration, first as assistant registrar for 10 years, then as registrar for 34 years.

Chapman knew the one other person they needed for this project was Walter Smith. Smith had worked for 32 years as the advisor to the Laurel yearbook, Hilltop student newspaper, and was editor of the alumni magazine. Over the years he had organized and saved 32 boxes of Laurel photos, which he stored on campus. He had also stored thousands of pictures taken by Pop Stringfield, an instructor, over a 40-year period beginning in 1904.

Norton, born in Mars Hill, had graduated in 1980 with a BS in accounting and returned as the assistant director of the college bookstore. He loves history, and through the study of his own families' genealogy, he found he was related to two of the founding families of the college. Chapman remembers that his former student got almost too much enjoyment out of now directing his professor in assignments and deadlines.

During a research expedition to Chapel Hill in Raleigh seeking information about the slave Joe Anderson, who is also named as a Founding Father, the authors were able to add seven more names of original trustees to the previous 16 established in 1967 when the last history of the college was written.

"These folks were courageous, dirt-poor, large families. But they had a vision for a school to educate their children in a way that they could keep their own religious beliefs alive," said Smith.

The book begins with the dedication, "Too much credit cannot be given these noble men; they builded better than they knew."

The authors began their research at the Ramsey Center Archives, with much help from Special Collections Supervisor Peggy Harmon, by going through every single bit of history spanning the past 150 years of Mars Hill.

With good humor, Chapman now admits that they made some mistakes in the beginning. Sorting through decades of boxes, the men began putting all kinds of photographs into piles. Weeks later, after they had gone through everything, they realized they had not dated any of the individual pictures they had pulled from the dated boxes! It took them two more weeks to straighten everything out.

The authors also went door-to-door, meeting with any members of families they could find to supplement the information and photos they already had.

The book is divided into five eras.

During the first 41 years of its history, Mars Hill saw 16 different presidents. The school actually had to close down for two years during the Civil War. Troops were quartered on campus and two college buildings were burned in 1865.

Mars Hill first came under a stable administration when it hired 27-year-old Robert Lee Moore, who led the college for the 41 years from 1897-1938. In the book is a story characterizing Moore's method of discipline. Students began stealing the pendulum off of the wall clock used to determine when classes began and ended. President Moore addressed the issue and told the bell ringer the school would use his own watch to acknowledge the time. But Moore adjusted his watch to display ten minutes later, moving the daily schedule back for everything, including meal times and class endings. The pendulum reappeared on the clock that night.

Authors Chapman and Smith entered Mars Hill as students during the administration of Dr. Hoyt Blackwell, which lasted from 1938 to 1966. The college was still a two year college when the authors attended as students in the 1940s. Chapman joined the staff in 1947 and Smith joined the staff in 1954. Despite World War II, this period saw the biggest physical growth of the campus.

President Fred Bentley established a special relationship with students during his administration that lasted from 1966-1996. Bentley had himself been a high jumper as a student at Baylor University. One afternoon he was down at the track field observing some of the athletes practicing. They challenged him to jump the bar. He agreed and did well, ripping open his pants in the meantime! Bentley, 6'4" and only 30 years old when he was hired, for a time was the youngest college president in the nation. He later helped the school receive accreditation as a four-year institution.

The last section of the book covers the administrations of President Max Lennon and Dan Lunsford, bringing the readers into the present.

Reader Comment:

Noel Kinnamon, professor of English, 10/13/2006, 5:19 p.m.
Well done, Ingrid! NK

Libbie Dellinger, Senior, 4/19/2007, 12:38 a.m. Nice article! Pop Stringfield is my great grandfather!

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