York College

By Tim McNeese, Bev McNeese and Christi Lones

The dream of York College involved hundreds of people its reality has touched the lives of thousands. Born in a small town on the rolling plains of Nebraska in 1890, the United Brethren Church and citizens of York established York College on an empty expanse of prairie called East Hill. Its earliest classes, offered in rented rooms above a dry goods store on the town square, established the foundations of a Christian college. The institution grew as buildings arrived with each passing decade. These brick-and-mortar symbols of the college s progress include Old Main, Hulitt Conservatory of Music, Alumni Library, and Middlebrook Hall. When a tragic fire engulfed the school s venerable Old Main in 1951, York College was pulled from the ashes as a second group of believers took the institution's reins. The Churches of Christ determined to continue the dream, standing on the shoulders of those who had come before them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781439647943

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INTRODUCTION

Today, it is still visible from a lonely satellite drifting through space. Go online to Google Maps. Type in the words York Nebraska and enlarge the map until you can make out the roofs of the college’s buildings, some of which have stood for more than a century. Locate the Mackey Center on the east side and Hulitt Hall on the west. Now focus on the space between them, and a shadowy remnant of York College’s past appears dimly in the grass. It looks like a needle, a thin brown line, wide enough for an automobile, culminating on its northern end with an eye, a circle drive that once stood outside the southern dual entrances to Old Main, York College’s first and most expansive building. It was a grand old pile of bricks, towering up on East Hill, rising 110 feet from its foundations to the tip of its flagpole, a 45-star national emblem waving in a stiff Nebraska breeze above the grassy plains of the early 1890s. Old Main is gone now, having died a fiery death on a cold night in January 1951. That dim driveway, that needle, still points to something—a history and a place, one spanning psychic distance, its roots watered by faith, planted deep in the soil of York, Nebraska. How Old Main and the college it represented came to be is a story worth telling.

In 1870, York was little more than one lone house. Less than a decade had passed since the passage of the Homestead Act, American Indians still roamed within two days’ horse ride along the Oregon Trail, and the Transcontinental Railroad had just been completed the previous year. The railroad reached York in 1878, and the town sprang to life. Over the following dozen years, progress was planted on the Plains. Beyond a bank, a post office, dry goods stores, and a newspaper, a school was envisioned. In 1880, the Methodists opened theirs—the Nebraska Conference Seminary—with the literature describing their school as located in a thrifty section of the state, in a town where there never had been a saloon. They set up shop in January in the original Congregational Academy building located on the west end of Seventh Street. (While the building is gone today, Academy Avenue remains.)

The school did well for a time, moving to a new brick facility located close to the site of today’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. (The building, now gone, would later house the Ursuline Sisters, an order of nuns, and even later still would become St. Joseph’s Academy.) The seminary became a college in 1883 and was renamed Methodist Episcopal College of Nebraska officially, but often the locals just simply referred to the school as if it were theirs—as York College. It boasted a dozen instructors and had an enrollment of 313 by 1885. Tuition ran between $6 and $7 per term. Many of the college’s students focused their studies on teacher education and business courses. But even as enrollment climbed, so did debts, and by 1888, the Methodists closed the doors, with the Catholic Church assuming control and reopening the facility the following year as Ursuline Academy. Meanwhile, the Methodists moved to Lincoln and opened a new school: Nebraska Wesleyan University.

With its first college having come and gone within a single decade, the people of York sought out another religious group to establish a college in their prairie community. Land was selected for a college by local citizens on York’s East Hill—enter the United Brethren. In 1886, the United Brethren Church had purchased, from a group of Baptists, Gibbon Collegiate Institute, located in Gibbon, Nebraska, about 70 miles east of York. The academy there ran from 1886 until 1890, under the auspices of Western College, in Toledo, Iowa. But Gibbon proved an awkward place for a college. The town was too small, and citizens never fully bought in. Financial problems were exaggerated by a severe drought that hit the region. Church officials decided to close the Gibbon school and move their operations to York when the Methodists had left. When the United Brethren opened their new school, they named it York College. Ironically, the United Brethren Congregation in York had been established just three years earlier.

It is from this time-distant place—York, Nebraska, in 1890—that the story begins to take on a life of its own, one, ultimately, of endurance; one that has seen fitful starts and stops; financial crises and historical drama; problems and praises. Over the next 125 years, York College would not only endure, but would thrive, progress, spread out, even as those offering its classes, raising its buildings, and guiding six generations of young men and women would themselves change, with each new generation of instructors, administrators, staff, students, alumni, and various and sundry well-wishers. The story of York College is, in some respects, two stories linked in purpose and place. The United Brethren would lay the groundwork for the college on the hill with 11 presidents steering the ship for more than 60 years. Those stalwart men of faith, relying on push and enterprise, built a school from scratch, and their efforts continue to bear fruit. To leave its leaders anonymous and unnamed would be amiss:

United Brethren Presidents of York College, 1890–1954

Those early decades brought new buildings, a wide variety of courses and academic programs, and sports teams. There were dramatic productions, literary societies, music, and traditions, some of which have remained a part of campus to today. The college’s first song, a theme written by C.W. Gwinn in 1905 (and later tweaked by Ethel Clarke), opens with confident lyrics: Come, let us sing together / A glad Triumphant song / To our own Alma Mater / With praises loud and long / The pansy is here emblem / Of every tint and hue / Her banner floating o’er us / Is the royal White and Blue. Today, neither the pansy nor the song are a part of York College, but another song, one penned by Ruby Carol Rickard, remains as the college anthem, ever extolling loyalty