Click each image above to see a larger version and captions. Samford University began life as Howard College in Marion, Alabama in 1841, but in 1887 sought better fortune in the East Lake community of Birmingham. The college grew dramatically in East Lake, but was threatened by economic depression and war in the 1930s and 1940s. Howard president Harwell Goodwin Davis (1939-1957) sought ways to insulate the school from the hard times, and during WWII actively lobbied for and won a contract with the federal government to host a branch of the U.S. Navy’s V-12 training program. The Navy brought Howard money and men at a time when both were in short supply at the college. The money, in particular, would have far-reaching effects on Howard. Davis saved enough of the V-12 funds to allow Howard to leave behind the East Lake campus that never was all it had originally promised to be. Post-war enrollment increased thanks in part to the GI Bill, making relocation of the college ever more appealing. By the late 1940s Howard's leaders had selected a site for a spacious new campus in Shades Valley, just south of Birmingham. They broke ground for Howard's third and final campus on June 11, 1953 and dedicated the campus's first building, Samford Hall, in 1955. Howard occupied its new campus in 1957 as Davis's ambitious vision of an architecturally uniform Georgian-Colonial campus slowly took shape. Text and captions adapted from 160 Years of Samford University: For God, For Learning, Forever by Sean Flynt (Arcadia Publishing, 2001). |