Guest: Jacob Jones, Director of Admissions at Spring Hill College
Spring Hill College, Alabama’s oldest institution of higher learning, was founded in 1830 by Michael Portier, Mobile’s first Catholic bishop. Spring Hill is also the first Catholic college in the Southeast, the third oldest Jesuit college, and the fifth oldest Catholic college in the United States.
Bishop Portier purchased 300 acres of land to establish a seminary and boarding school. The site sat on a hill six miles west of Mobile and afforded panoramic views of the city and its harbor. Portier recruited two priests and four seminarians from France to staff the school. He originally intended the boarding school to provide students under the age of 12 with an education in classical and modern languages, mathematics, geography, astronomy, history, belles lettres, physics, and chemistry. Portier soon relaxed the age restriction, and the boarding population increased from roughly 30 students the first year to almost 130 two years later. Initially, the bishop himself taught Greek at the school and, due to the lack of priests, pressed seminarians into service as teaching assistants or monitors. Difficulties staffing the school persisted until 1847, when Portier recruited French Jesuits from Lyon to take over.
In 1932, the college launched an extension program with Saturday classes aimed at adults. For the first time, women were admitted as full-time students to the program. Successive presidents of Spring Hill, Patrick Donnelly, S.J., and Andrew Smith, S.J., brought landmark changes to the college after World War II. Both men viewed racial segregation as an ethical and moral dilemma, and in 1954 Smith presided over the enrollment of nine African-American students to the college. For the following decade, Spring Hill was the first and only integrated college in the Deep South.
The College has thrived with strong enrollments and support from alumni, friends and the Greater Mobile community. Today’s students live and learn on a beautiful and historic residential campus and are part of a close-knit living and learning community. Creating enriching opportunities, inspiring ideas and creativity and transforming students are all part of the Spring Hill College experience.
A few inspiring SHC stories:
Spring Hill led the way in desegregation among Southern colleges and earned the respect of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who mentioned the moral significance of Spring Hill’s initiatives in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
In 1956, Ms. Fannie Motley became the first African American graduate of the college. She was one of only two Mobile area students to graduate with honors that year.
The first internationally acclaimed chess champion was Paul Morphy, a Spring Hill alumnus who was regarded as the best in the world in 1854.
Famed inventor Thomas Edison needed a chief engineer to help him in his work in 1912. His choice was Miller Reese Hutchison, an inventor in his own right and an 1895 graduate of Spring Hill.
For more than 25 years, the Spring Hill College Division of Philosophy and Theology has set the standard in offering programs on campus and in other Southern cities. Spring Hill offers its adult programs in theology not only in Mobile but also in Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and Atlanta, Georgia. Graduate and undergraduate degrees and certificates can be earned at all locations, or classes can be taken for personal enrichment. The program provides a study of all major areas of theology in the Catholic tradition (biblical, moral, historical, pastoral and systematic). It is ecumenical in perspective and designed for persons with varying levels of previous theological background.
Dr. Joseph Miller ‘42, a research biologist, helped develop the treatment for Infant Respiratory Distress Syndrome (IRDS).
For more info: www.shc.edu
