CNIS Class Photo in front of Joyner, 1915
In 1912, Alonzo C. Reynolds became president of Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School (CNIS), sparking debates about the school's mission. Could the school achieve its education aspirations if it simply remained a high school? But by 1918, CNIS revised its curriculum to offer a six-year program, including two years of preparatory classes and a four-year program leading to a junior college degree. The school offered degrees in teaching, classics, and vocational agriculture, with most students choosing teaching.
Reynolds improved campus facilities, adding electricity, central heating, and a new classroom/administration building. After a brief second term by Robert Madison (1920-23), Hiram T. Hunter led the school鈥檚 transition to a junior college although in the late 1920s, the school鈥檚 future was again questioned. Yet the high school program was handed over to the county, and in 1925, CNIS became Cullowhee State Normal School. Enrollment grew, dormitory life became central, and the school expanded with the addition of a 65-acre farm.
From Normal School to Teachers' College
Alonzo C. Reynolds, formerly the Buncombe County school superintendent, arrived in Cullowhee in 1912 to replace Robert Lee Madison as president of Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School, he discovered that the school owned no vehicles. To remedy that deficiency, he purchased a small cart and two Shetland ponies that were used to haul supplies from Sylva. The Reynolds family posed here in front of the Davies Home. Left to right: Mrs. Reynolds, Margaret (who died in 1917), Alphonzo, Alonzo C., Elizabeth, Sally, Ruth, and Mary.
A boiler was installed in 1910 to power the school's first central heating plant. The boiler heated the Old Madison Building and the newly-completed Davies Home (the women's dormitory); the Joyner Building was added to the system when it was completed in 1913.
Joyner Building, opened in 1913, was named for Cullowhee Normal and Industrial board member and State Superintendent of Public Instruction J. Y. Joyner. This new structure replaced the Old Madison Building as the center of student life. In addition to administrative offices and classrooms, it housed at various times the library, post office, bookstore, snack bar, and gymnasium.
This earliest-known photograph of the entire faculty of the Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School was taken in 1918. Mrs. Mary Flintom, the widowed sister of President Reynolds's wife, came to Cullowhee in 1915 to run the school's kitchen and dining room.
The CNIS campus, around 1923, seen from Dix Gap near the present-day intersection of Central Drive and NC 1001. President Hunter, Dean Bird, and history professor Edgar Stillwell all lived in the Dix Gap community (foreground). The three large buildings clustered in the rear center are (L to R) Moore Dormitory (before the wings were added to its ends), the Training School, and Joyner Building. Davies Hall is the large building on the ridge to the right and to its right is the original Mt. Zion AME Zion church, the center of Cullowhee's African American population. Behind and below this ridge is the Tuckasegee River and the village of Cullowhee. Sarah Madison, who grew up in Cullowhee and attended WCTC in the mid-1940s, remembered that the village "had a post office.... It had a soda shop that was owned by Mr. Buchanan, and it had Battle's Grocery Store. And then there was Moss General Store, which I really liked, it had penny candy." Rising above Sylva in the far distance are the Plott Balsam Mountains.
After his second resignation as president, Robert Madison remained to teach English until his retirement in 1937. His warmth and generosity and his love of teaching are still remembered by hundreds of alumni. His grandson James A. Madison remembers that "he was a well-respected person, an extremely intelligent individual. And a pack rat! He saved newspapers and magazines.... He knew where everything was." Here he stands with a snowball at the ready.
A dormitory room at the Normal School. After the construction of Moore Dormitory for women in 1925, men lived in Old Madison and Davies. Dorm life The N.C. State banner might indicate a male student's educational plans after he completed his two years at CNS. Ray Gibbs, a 1926 graduate, recalled that electric power was turned off in the dorms at 9:00 p.m.: "I spent many an evening and maybe half the night studying by candle." There were proctors who lived in the dorms to supervise the men, but "they were very inactive . . . because we were just one big bunch; we played ball together, we fought together, we ate together, we slept in the same building, we stuck together, so a proctor wouldn't have been of much benefit."
The entrance to Cullowhee State Normal School in the 1920s. The photograph was taken from the road where Cullowhee Baptist Church and the Steam Plant today face each other. The building in the foreground was the old Methodist Church that later moved down the road to its present location. The road between the sign and the church went up to Moore and Joyner Buildings. Beyond the church was the Dallas Wike store, later the Bryson store; Breese Gymnasium stands there now. The small structure attached to the store was the Cullowhee Post Office. The school later purchased the store and used it as a carpentry shop.
This early athletic field was on the Tom Ledbetter farm some distance from the campus. The field lay alongside the Tuckasegee River on the road to Sylva, just beyond the village of Cullowhee. The riverbank and the cut for the road, then named Highway 106 and now NC 1001, can be seen just below the hillside cabin. The site was later occupied by the Battle Trailer Park.