DownloadSept. 21, 2009 issue
A school on the prairie: Hesston College centennial
By John E. Sharp Hesston CollegeHESSTON, Kan. — Hesston College, a school on the prairie, opened on a “fair and very pleasant” Wednesday, Sept. 22, 1909.
Martha Hershberger of Hesston, Kan., and Faith Penner of Harper, Kan., a mother-daughter team, work on the Hesston College Centennial Quilt. The quilt will be unveiled after a Sept. 25 performance of the musical Quilters. Hershberger and Penner, along with Gloria Hostetler of Harper, used bronze-colored thread to quilt swirls in the body of the quilt to represent the swirling Kansas wind. The quilt will be mounted in Bontrager Student Center. — Photo provided by Hesston College
Twenty-one students, three teachers, one faculty assistant and three staff members made up the new learning community.
A borrowed grade-school bell called the students and teachers together for a chapel service of singing and speechmaking.
“Borrowed” seems to have been the order of the day. Students sat on borrowed camp chairs. Teachers used borrowed tables for desks. Blackboards had not yet arrived.
There was water standing in the dining room, the “Green Gables” basement. Skirting the puddles, Etta Cooprider cooked meals on a borrowed coal oil stove. Meals were served in the laundry room.
Water for drinking, cooking and washing was carried from the hand pump 40 paces south of the building. Restroom accommodations — outhouses — were 20 feet beyond the west door.
The school was the dream of Pennsylvania immigrants of Swiss origin who had begun arriving in Harvey County in 1880. They envisioned a school that would educate students, but more than that, nurture them in the historic Mennonite faith tradition. Though Bethel College opened its doors in 1893, the cultural gap between General Conference Mennonites and the Mennonite Church was too broad to bridge.
Conversation about a school west of the Mississippi River had begun at least as early as 1902 when Elkhart (Ind.) Institute was in the process of becoming Goshen College. When neither funding nor location materialized for a second school, the conversation in Indiana died.
But it refused to die in Kansas. It was the topic of conversations around dinner tables, across line fences and on meetinghouse grounds.
A Sunday afternoon discussion in the T.M. and Lizzie (Hess) Erb home with Sam and Anna (Smith) King as guests led to official action in the fall assembly of the Kansas-Nebraska Mennonite Conference in Cheraw, Colo., on October 18, 1907. The delegates resolved that a school specializing in Bible training would, in the words of Anna (Smith) King, “advance the cause of Christ.”
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