CONSTRUCTING TRADITIONS: ARCHITECTURE, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION EXPERIENCE AT SPELMAN COLLEGE, 1850 - 1925

Abstract

ABSTRACT

When the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, later known as Spelman College, opened its doors on April 11, 1881, in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, the objects that made up the materiality of the seminary consisted of two Bibles, two notebooks, and two pencils. By 1886 with the opening of the seminary’s landmark Rockefeller Hall, the materiality of Spelman had grown to six times its original size, and that growth led to the donation and inclusion of objects that reflected the beliefs of Spelman’s founders, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, and its primary benefactor John D. Rockefeller. With the passage of time, those objects continued to not only reflect the seminary’s mission and goals, but they also began to reflect paternalism, the tenets of segregation, and the promises of the New South. The outlines of Spelman’s institutional history are known. This study uses that scholarship as a foundation for a different query: how three characteristics of campus development (material, architectural, and educational) created and contributed to a distinct culture of refined African American womanhood on the campus of Spelman College. Emphasizing the role of architecture and objects in creating culture, this study considers how that culture manifested itself through the behavior of the college’s administrators and the ultimate submission of the students.