Founded by Friends : the Quaker heritage of fifteen - Scarecrow Press

Guilford College 29
The transition was going smoothly, and enrollment increased with the
improved standards and facilities. Francis King proposed that the trustees
invite Joseph Moore to lead the institution during its transformation into
a college. Moore was president of Earlham College and had headed up
the Baltimore Association’s establishment of the elementary school system
in the late 1860s. Joseph Moore worked with the faculty and built the
school’s natural sciences program. All the leading teachers of the past,
such as the influential Nereus Mendenhall, had been classical scholars
rather than scientists. During Moore’s last year, he reorganized the curriculum
by reducing the number of courses and by offering advanced
classes in both the classical and the literary-scientific track. There was no
controversy about curricular innovations as the course work was revised
to meet collegiate standards and as new scientific theories, such as evolution,
were added to the course of study.
The school did experience an unexpected setback before it completed
the transition. In 1885, the original King Hall donated by North Carolina
Yearly Meeting burned. The decision was made to replace it with two
buildings: a classroom building and a dormitory for boys. The brick from
the destroyed building was salvaged to construct what would become
Archdale Hall (named for the colonial Quaker governor of Carolina, John
Archdale). A new King Hall was completed in time to open only a year after
the first burned.
A NEW BEGINNING: GUILFORD COLLEGE
The trustees offered the position of first president to Joseph Moore. Moore
returned to Earlham instead and recommended Lewis Lyndon Hobbs for
the position. Hobbs and Moore had worked closely together during the
years of Friends School at New Garden, and Hobbs had served as principal
of New Garden Boarding School before Moore’s appointment. Hobbs
had attended New Garden as a student under Nereus Mendenhall and
went on to graduate from Haverford College in 1876. He was well respected
both as a scholar and as a member of North Carolina Yearly Meeting,
serving as yearly meeting clerk from 1886 to 1916 and from 1921 to
1928.
Although New Garden Boarding School was widely regarded as a
Friends’ school and had close ties to North Carolina Yearly Meeting, no
connections to Friends were explicitly made until the incorporation of
Guilford College. The college charter of 1889 specified that the trustees
had to be members of the Society of Friends and “recognized as such by
the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends.” This limitation to Quakers