The advancement of civilization demands a full development of the minds of our girls. The day when the boy is to be educated and the girl neglected has, like other relics of barbarism, passed into history.
- Irving College catalogue for 1896-1897
Coming at the dawn of the Progressive Era, the sentiments above seem to herald exciting opportunities at a small, private women’s college in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. At the same time, however, the school motto emblazoned at the front of the catalogue suggests a contradictory aim. The words are taken from Psalm 114:12:
That our daughters may be as corner stones polished after the similitude of a palace.
Personal fulfillment versus social ornamentation: that dichotomy came to the fore during the nineteenth century, as economic growth and cultural evolution raised new questions about the proper role of women in American life. Higher education marked one field in which this tension played out. The first all-female college appeared in Georgia in 1836, and new coeducational schools such as Oberlin College (1833) and Antioch College (1853) opened their doors to a few pioneering young women as well. By the time of the Civil War, women’s colleges were sprouting up all across the country. Some, like Vassar College, went on to gain a national reputation for academic excellence and liberating influence. Others, more modest in size and ambition, rose and fell in relative obscurity.
Such was the case with Irving College in Mechanicsburg. The school was founded in 1856 by an enterprising local businessman, Solomon Gorgas, who sought instant cachet by naming it after the famous writer Washington Irving. (Popular histories credit Irving College with being the first degree-granting women’s college in the state, but serious studies debunk this notion.) The fortunes of the school faltered in the postwar years, and it succumbed to a temporary closure in 1883. In 1886 Irving reopened under new leadership, and the next thirty years saw its greatest success. The original classroom and residential building on campus was expanded three times between 1892 and 1902. Semi-professional music training joined the traditional liberal arts curriculum in 1895. Enrollment ran steady at 100 or more, including part-time and commuting students. By 1920, however, Irving had entered a period of fatal decline. Weak management, financial insecurity, high faculty turnover, competition from coeducational schools, and an inability to maintain educational standards eventually combined to force the closure of Irving College in 1929.
Today, public memory seems to accord Irving College the status of little more than a “charm school,” finishing off proper young ladies to be dutiful mothers and decorative wives. This may be due, in part, to the reminiscences of the last surviving alumnae in the last decades of the twentieth century. By the time they attended Irving, in the 1920s, the school had probably lost much of whatever academic reputation it may have once had. The shift away from a solid liberal arts orientation is evident in the last senior class, which had only twenty-six students enrolled in the Academic Department. The Conservatory of Music had enrolled twenty-nine; the Home Economics Department, twenty; the Dramatic Art Department, thirteen; and the Secretarial Training Department, nine.
A further challenge in seeking a full understanding of Irving College is the dearth of personal accounts from its heyday. The only document approaching a memoir is a recollection of college history, written late in life by a 1904 graduate, Lenore Embick Flower. This slim volume mostly rehashes the standard narrative of growth and decline, offering few insights into the meaning or impact of the college in the lives of its students. Scholarly research on the school is virtually non-existent as well — with the admirable exception of a 282-page master’s thesis by Chad Leinaweaver, a former Mechanicsburg resident studying at Northeastern University.
In 1964, the Mechanicsburg Area School District was created by merging three existing school districts: the Mechanicsburg School District, the Upper Allen School District and the Shiremanstown School District. The school district is fortunate to have in its archives a collection of documents from the former Shiremanstown School District.