History of the Guilford College Community and Education
By James Simmons, Guilford College, 2014
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The area now known as the Guilford College community has changed dramatically since the region was first settled
by European American Quakers in the 1750s. Since then, many schools and people have come and gone, but the
community remains intact. The community has historically focused on creating opportunities for education to those in
and outside of the community and it continues to do so today.
Guilford College Community
In 1750, a small group of Quakers established New Garden in the western part of what is now Guilford
County.1 This community of Quakers predates the British mapping of Guilford County by twentyone
years. The
correspondence between the New Garden Monthly Meeting, established 1754, and the North Carolina Yearly
Meeting, established 1698,2 documents their desire to found schools that would both educate and maintain a
burgeoning population of North Carolina Quakers and nonQuakers
alike. Establishing itself as a community devoted
to education helped North Carolina Friends to spread their principles through schools like New Garden Boarding
School.
New Garden Boarding School opened in 1837, bringing with it a deeply invested population of Quaker
educators and students. Starting in 1846, all denominations of students, so long as they had recommendations, would
be able to attend the school. New Garden Boarding School—the Yearly Meeting school of North Carolina—thusly
grew over the nineteenth century, but years of the United States’ Civil War brought with it debt, lower subscription
rates, and years of instability for the school. Further, in 1865 the war ended, leaving behind fears of emigration as
“the steady flow of emigration was checked during the war—now it was a flood.”3 In response to the emigration of
Friends from North Carolina, the Baltimore Association of Friends “decided to appropriate five thousand dollars to
New Garden Boarding School to establish a primary system,”4 both to prepare students for higher education and to
create incentive for Friends to remain in North Carolina.
This plan worked, bringing more people to the New Garden community seeking education and opportunity.
Mary Mendenhall Hobbs puts the importance of the investment into context when she says, “The public schools
were either suspended or were very inferior, and pupils not Friends entered our Monthly Meeting Schools.”5 The
community and school of New Garden grew outward until 1888 when “the final step was taken and the institution
was rechartered and became Guilford College.”6 Following the college's renamed status, the New Garden
community was quickly rechartered to the town of Guilford College.
At this time the town was both indistinguishable from the college and primarily a Quaker community, but as
Guilfordborn
resident Frank Crutchfield says, “That was changed when [the community] voted for an extra tax to
extend the public school year for more than 5 months.”7 The community's commitment to education was so appealing
that North Carolinians from all over started migrating to Guilford College; Harriet Hood's father is one of these early
relocators,
saying “I cannot afford to send my children to college, but I can go where the school and college is.” 8
Like many during this period they moved to Guilford College, a “village with a College as the center of most
activity.”8 This movement towards Guilford College continued, and in 1935 a census from the General Assembly of
the state's schools showed community and student population as 2500 and 500 respectively.10
The community and the college were together until April 1959, when Robert H. Frazier, Chairmen of the
Board of Trustees of Guilford College, sought for the General Assembly to annex Guilford College to Greensboro.
The private land owners were unanimously opposed.11 The college was seeking annexation because the Trustees
were interested in a one million dollar expansion that “depended on fire protection.”12 In 1961, the state General
Assembly removed the college from the town of Guilford College so that it could be annexed by the city of
Greensboro.
Only eleven years after the college was annexed, “the 95 acres and 26 houses and five businesses of the
town [became] a part of the city of Greensboro,” much to the chagrin of the residents.13 After this annexation,
expansion followed with the widening of Friendly Avenue from two to five lanes to better accommodate a “serious
traffic bottleneck,”14 leaving Guilford College as a “no longer sleepy community.”15
New Garden Yearly Meeting School
Agreed upon in 1831, chartered in 1834, and opened in 1837, New Garden Boarding School was the product of
North Carolina Yearly Meeting’s commitment to education. The 1831 agreement was meant to resolve needs for
teachers, coeducation, and the establishment of primary schools in all Quaker communities,16 leading to the charter of
New Garden Boarding School through North Carolina’s General Assembly in 1834. New Garden Boarding School
opened in 1837 with “50 scholars 25 of each sex.”17 New Garden Boarding School remained a Quaker
selectschool
until a transformation occurred in 1846, changing the school's recruitment criteria in order to promote
financial solvency.
Regardless of these efforts, the 1860 balance of the school's debt stood ominously at $16,000, threatening
to close the doors of New Garden Boarding School. However, Jonathan Cox took over the debt and the school to
keep it alive.18 It was the actions of Jonathan Cox and Nerus Mendenhall that brought the school through the
troubled years of war and Reconstruction, and it was the Baltimore Association's campaigning and donations that
droveback
the overhanging debt. The attention that the Baltimore Association gave to North Carolina should not be
glossed over, “The Baltimore Association had not only assisted New Garden Boarding School at a critical time but
had established a normal school and a set of forty elementary schools employing 62 teachers and having enrollment
of 2425 students by 1871.”19
Starting around 1873, the Baltimore Association, with the leadership of Baltimore Quaker Francis T. King,
began guiding New Garden Boarding School to become the establishment of a Yearly Meeting College.20 The result
of this movement was a college aptly named: Friends School, Guilford, North Carolina. Despite the name change,
the school was still known as New Garden Boarding School for five years preceding the final 1888 rechartering of
the institution to Guilford College.21 Guilford College was “thus the first degree granting institution in the county.22
Since that time, Guilford College has grown and celebrated many changes, but none so great as that from boarding
school to college.
New Garden Monthly Meeting School
The New Garden Monthly Meeting School began as a “little brick school built just back of the old meeting
house,”23 but the meeting minutes for this time are so flimsy that “when the yearly meeting call for the report [in
1830], there was no school being taught at New Garden.”24 After finding out that the schools were struggling, the
Yearly Meeting began to focus more on the stability and upkeep of monthly meeting schools. By 1832,
“twentyseven
pupils were enrolled” to the New Garden Monthly Meeting School.
One of the struggles facing monthly meeting schools was finding and holding onto quality teachers. This
would change, however, with the success of New Garden Boarding School; they say in a letter from the North
Carolina Yearly Meeting to New Garden Monthly, “Four hundred students have received education in New Garden
Boarding School and nearly one hundred have since been employed as teachers,” and further, “never again would
Monthly Meetings find it necessary to report, as they did in 1831, that there were few Quaker teachers.”25
These monthly meeting schools were becoming very popular, as Mary Mendenhall Hobbs puts it “the public
schools were either suspended or were very inferior, and pupils not Friends entered our Monthly Meeting schools.”26
The little brick school held until 1885, when a new public school building became the focus of the Monthly Meeting.
In 1903, the first usage of the new public school in Guilford College took place. This building stood and served for
many years as a Monthly Meeting school, until it was inevitably absorbed: “The Monthly Meeting Schools have been
absorbed by our rapidly developing public system, which has so changed in outlook that a good high school course
will soon be within reach of every boy and girl in the state.”27
New Garden Friends School
A group of concerned citizens met to discuss a new school in 1971; they wished to use Carolina Friends
School in DurhamChapel
Hill as a “model of education in which a radically diverse student population would work
well together.”28 The plan was to open up Carolina Friends School/Guilford division in Fall 1971. The school started
in the basement of Persimmons Grove A.M.E. Church, situated near Guilford College.
In 1972, “the school was incorporated as New Garden Friends School”29 with a 12:1 studentteacher
ratio,
spanning kindergarten to sixth grade. In 1973, eighth grade was added, and the middleschool
arm moved to
Greensboro College. There they stayed until 1980, when the middle and upper divisions—now spanning to tenth
grade—moved into a few mobile classrooms on the back section of Guilford College. The current curriculum—as
opposed to the traditional guarded education—works towards “an educational environment wherein children can
discover, reinvent, and construct knowledge through a process of exploration, experimentation, and creation.”30
End Notes
1. Stoesen 2.
2. Briggs 7.
3. Gilbert 112.
4. Ibid 112.
5. Hobbs 40.
6. Klain 91.
7. Harris.
8. Hood 2.
9. Ibid 2.
10. Guilford College Parent Teacher Association Scrapbook, 19341935,
March.
11. “Guilford College Asks Annexation by City and Arbitration on Issue of Water Rates.”
12. Weaver.
13. Ibid.
14. Schlosser.
15. Ibid.
16. Klain 72.
17. Harris.
18. Gilbert 100.
19. Ibid 148.
20. Klain 89.
21. Gilbert 162.
22. Stoesen 14.
23. Gilbert 8.
24. Ibid 22.
25. Ibid 76.
26. Hobbs 40.
27. Ibid 45.
28. Raper 10.
29. Ibid 11.
30. Ibid 12.
References
Briggs, Alpheus. A History of North Carolina Yearly Meetings and Education in North Carolina Yearly
Meeting, Copy made from manuscript, 1937.
Gilbert, Dorthy. Guilford: A Quaker College, Greensboro, NC: Joseph J. Stone & Company, 1937.
“Guilford College Asks Annexation by City and Arbitration on Issue of Water Rates,” Greensboro Record, April
23, 1959.
Harris, Harvey. “Guilford College Community Bucks Trend: Schools A Rallying Point For Spirit, Togetherness,”
Greensboro Record, June 8, 1978.
Hood, Harriet. Account of Guilford Graded School, Copy made from manuscript, 1985.
Klain, Zora. Quaker Contributions to Education in North Carolina, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1924.
Hobbs, Mary Mendenhall. Civil War and Reconstruction Through the Eyes of Mary Mendenhall Hobbs,
Greensboro, NC: North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 2011.
Raper, Anne. “Brief Histories of Three Southern Friends Schools: New Garden Friends School,” The North
Carolina Friends Society, 1995.
Schlosser, Jim. “A Boom Afoot: Guilford College No Longer Sleepy Campus Community,” Greensboro Record,
November 16, 1978.
Stoesen, Alexander. Guilford County: A Brief History, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1993.
Weaver, Bill. “Strike of Midnight Will Change Town: Guilford College Area To Be Annexed JulyG 1re,”e nsboro
Daily News, June 26, 1972.
Textiles, Teachers, and Troops - Greensboro 1880-1945
