The Albright Reporter: Schuylkill Seminary - Schuylkill Seminary - Moves, Mergers, Clashes and Consolidation

Schuylkill Seminary
Bringing Something Home

The entrance into Schuylkill Seminary is via a red metal ladder leaning from the ground up into a gaping hole. Clambering into the opening, a piece of the wooden doorframe comes away in my hands. In the large room to the left, once the chapel, the floor is caved in. A few wooden chicken cages lay on the ground.

Schuylkill Seminary is on its last legs, literally falling apart.

It started with a phone call to the College Relations Office from Byron Reed, the plant engineer of the company that now owns the property, issuing an invitation to Albright to see the place before it fell down and to claim whatever was left of interest in the building. So on a hot, muggy July day, four of us drove to Fredericksburg to see what we could find.

There wasn’t much.

The roof has been gone for more than 30 years, as best as we could determine. It has been entirely open to the elements for years. Before it fell into disuse, it had been used to raise chickens.

The property is now owned by Farmers Pride, who produce Bell & Evans chickens, and the Seminary building is surrounded by the modern buildings of a poultry production plant. Scott Sechler, owner of Farmers Pride, being conservation minded, hates anything to go to waste, hence the offer. He plans to salvage the “hard, mountain stone” foundation, mentioned in the Seminary catalog, for use elsewhere after the building is demolished. The ruddy brick is too soft to reuse.

Two sets of exterior doors, several wide, arched doorframes and most of a lovely staircase are all that’s really left, all made of elm perhaps, or chestnut – hardwoods now long gone from the American landscape that have held up to the elements for more than 100 years.

We plan to salvage a few pieces of Schuylkill Seminary – a pair of doors, a small section of newell post and balusters from the stair, a few bricks. We want to display them somewhere on campus.

It isn’t much. But it feels right to have them come home.

– Barbara J. Marshall

This story started with a 1929 snapshot of a college president and a blacksmith.

Albright President Warren Teel, imposing in black academic gown, hammer in hand, stands at a blacksmith’s anvil in the stadium. He is assisted by a blacksmith wearing a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up, and surrounded by smiling coeds in white dresses. He is ready to hammer two links of chain together to symbolically seal the merger of Schuylkill College and Albright College, on this, Consolidation Day, June 1, 1929.

Consolidation Day was the beginning of one story, but it was also the end of another – a tale of a half-century of factions, a shattered church, moves, mergers and clashes. Consolidation Day is also the story of heroic leadership, heartbreak, a determined belief in the value of education, and reconciliation.

The wrangling began almost as soon as Union Seminary was founded in 1856 by the West Pennsylvania Conference of the Evangelical Association. The East Pennsylvania Conference’s support of the institution, financial and otherwise, was lukewarm, since they wanted a school in the region where the Church was originally founded. By 1881 there was a rival school. Schuylkill Seminary, so named because it was in the Schuylkill River valley, was lured by the potential of enrollment and financial support of the city of Reading and took quarters at 6th and Walnut Streets.

The school never really prospered in Reading and five years later when a benefactor, Colonel J.H. Lick, appeared, offering four acres “on a commanding eminence outside the town of Fredericksburg,” plus money for buildings, the seminary picked up and moved 28 miles to this rural hamlet of 700 souls. The view was breathtaking, the air fresh, the brick building stately, the transportation challenging. The nearest train was three miles away, with the remainder by stagecoach, horseback or foot.

Schuylkill Seminary was growing, but by 1891 another struggle was brewing. A division between factions within the Evangelical Association had ignited into open conflict. Described by Eugene Barth in his history of the College, it was a theological debate that grew into “a personal controversy between church leaders” over clerical control in church government. The clash eventually split the Evangelical Association, spinning off the United Evangelical Church.

The source of the struggle is less important for this story than the impact on the young Schuylkill Seminary. There followed a series of lawsuits, even a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision, over the properties. The short version is that the minority faction was in possession of the Seminary and running it, but the majority faction owned the property.

Most faculty and students sided with the minority faction. Knowing they might eventually be forced to surrender the big brick building in Fredericksburg, faculty and administration found another location in Myerstown, Pa., and in 1895 established Albright Collegiate Institute there, leaving just a handful of students in Fredericksburg.

Life in Fredericksburg was now difficult. Even the campus dog, Snow, had gone to Myerstown. Recruitment was challenged by a promised rail line that never materialized. The earlier sentiment that education was best conducted away from the temptations of the city began to change.

But the Seminary recovered and grew because of a singularly wise decision made by the Conference to tap the Reverend Warren F. Teel to be the school’s new principal.

Teel was a successful local businessman who had fairly recently been called to the ministry. Dedicated to the idea of education, he had both charisma and an ability to raise money.

The Reverend Mr. Teel accepted the job and began to raise funds and friends. A year later, he moved the school back to Reading.

The forebears of Albright College have been singularly fortunate in finding lovely locations. By 1902, Schuylkill Seminary was at home on North 13th Street at the foot of Mount Penn, in Selwyn Hall, formerly an Episcopal diocesan school.

Over the next 20 years, Teel turned Schuylkill Seminary into four-year, fully accredited Schuylkill College with 500 students, a strong faculty and an excellent academic reputation.

Meanwhile, in Myerstown, Albright Collegiate Institute became Albright College and also prospered.

But in 1922, the fate of the two schools once again hung on the church. The Evangelical Association and the United Evangelical Church reconciled their differences and reunited.

Because church leaders felt that growth in Myerstown would be limited, and the two schools would be in competition for church support, they had earlier decided Myerstown would be only a temporary site. Schuylkill College and Albright College would ultimately merge into a single institution in Reading called Albright.

Unfortunately the same church leaders didn’t communicate their intentions very well. Each school believed it would be the chosen location. So, in Myerstown and Reading both administrations were busily building, recruiting and growing, certain that they would be the final location.

The yearbook of the Myerstown class of 1929 reflects the heartbreak as once again, 33 years after the move to Myerstown, faculty and students packed up to move again.

Consolidation Day began with a luncheon and a grand reunion in Myerstown. After lunch, the motorcade set out for Reading, where a colorful parade marched from 5th and Penn to the new campus. Students, faculty, spectators and news photographers assembled in the Albright Stadium, celebrating the bright future of the College.

Two groups of coeds in white dresses each carried a length of chain to the anvil.

The photo of the Consolidation ceremony was snapped just before President Teel lifted his hammer to finally unite the links. Albright College. Reading, Pennsylvania.