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Moravian College • Preservation Master Plan
main building and center of the campus, and thus
occupied predominant spaces within the overall
plan of the growing campus.
Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies
The Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies remained
a primary and secondary school throughout most of
the nineteenth century, adding college-level courses
around the turn of the century. In 1913, it formally
incorporated as Moravian Seminary and College
for Women. This was done in part to increase the
size of the student body because Seminary-level
enrollment had dropped and the school depended
almost entirely on tuition income. However, larger
educational trends were at work as well. As public
secondary schools increased rapidly in number
throughout the country and turned out more
graduates, the need to offer higher education for
women became more critical. Within Bethlehem,
by now home to multiple men’s colleges, there
was growing interest in a women’s college, and
the Seminary expanded to fit that role (Weinlick
1977:92-93). This type of expansion was seen in
many women’s seminaries and boarding schools
of the era, concurrent with the overall expansion
of college-level opportunities and increased
competition to retain high school-level students
nationwide.
Throughout the early twentieth century, Moravian
Seminary and College for Women struggled to
survive and to expand its college program, doing
so with dropping enrollments, limited facilities
(figure 3-23) and a nearly nonexistent endowment.
To aid in building up and separating the college
program from the seminary, the school purchased
neighboring properties instead: Frueauff House in
Figure 3-23. View of students in the library of the Moravian
Seminary and College for Women, ca. 1929 (Moravian Viewbook
[1929]).
1914 and acquired Clewell Hall in the late 1930s.
Another building purchased in the 1930s no
longer belongs to Moravian. Several prospects of
benefactor gifts to fund a new library and other
amenities never panned out and the school went
deeply into debt, but in 1949, the school received
what was by far its largest gift: the 42-acre Green
Pond estate. Through the bequest of Mary T.
Snyder, the school now had a new campus for the
Seminary’s students from grades seven through
twelve (Weinlick 1977:93-98).
3.5 Postwar Modernism
Following World War II, American colleges and
universities nationwide saw unprecedented jumps
in enrollment. The GI Bill initially opened higher
education to thousands who would not have been
able to afford it otherwise, and subsequent to this a
greater percentage of Americans attended college.
The skyrocketing enrollment forced expansion of
physical plants, and progressive modern designers
developed plans that emphasized growth and
change rather than traditional design conventions.
Formal master building plans of the early 1900s were
abandoned in favor of more flexible, “organic” plans
that focused on having a set process for planning
instead of a concrete design. Informal and irregular
arrangements of buildings that took advantage of
landscape features became one solution, as were
designs that permitted the addition of numerous
new buildings as needed without disrupting the
existing campus. Academic programs expanded
exponentially, creating the need for ever-morediverse
building and programmatic functions,
including a new emphasis on research in addition
to teaching (Turner 1995:249-250).
Modern architectural design on campuses was
initially slow to catch on, and the appropriateness
of International Style modernism for academia was
a controversial topic in the 1930s and 1940s. At
progressive colleges, gradual adaptation of modern
buildings was preceded by experimentation with
informal plans. By the 1950s, Modernist architects
like Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, and Louis
Kahn were constructing new campus buildings
in unprecedented shapes, scales and materials to
fill in blank areas of campuses nationwide. There
was a decided trend toward architectural variety
within a campus, rather than depending on older
buildings for stylistic cues. As campuses grew,
new individual “buildings of distinction” formed
separate components of a mixed milieu rather than
John Milner Associates • October 2009 • Chapter 3 • College Context • 46