Masonic college remembered

St. Johns’ was lost cause after Civil War

Among the early institutions of higher education chartered in Arkansas was St. Johns’ College in Little Rock, created by the Arkansas General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. John S. Roane on the last day of December 1850. It took a while for the new college to get off the ground, and it was essentially still in its infancy when derailed by the Civil War.

St. Johns’ was a school created and administered by the Freemasons of Arkansas. In today’s world, when the various fraternal orders are fighting for survival, it is easy to underestimate their importance in 19th century Arkansas. And, following the Civil War, black fraternal groups rapidly spread across Arkansas and the rest of the South.

Freemasonry was remarkably broad in its appeal. In the era before mass communications, Freemasonry gave Arkansans social outlets as well as an opportunity to assemble in a spirit of cooperation and brotherhood. Literate men (and women, too, since the Masonic orders had female auxiliaries) were attracted to Masonry and saw the need for a college to educate their children.

Nathaniel G. Smith, chairman of the Grand Lodge’s committee on establishing a college, described the urgency of the need: “We need such an institution to relieve our people from the heavy expense and drain upon our resources and the humiliating necessity of being compelled to send our children abroad, in order to give them a thorough education.”

The estimable Elbert H. English, grand master of the Grand Lodge of Arkansas and a future veteran justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court, announced in November 1850 that “several Grand Lodges in our sister states have led off in this noble cause…” The name “St. John’s College” was chosen because of Freemason’s traditional honoring of St. John as a sort of patron saint.

The legislature acted quickly, as did the governor, but opening the school had to wait on fundraising efforts. Initial optimism that individual Masons would step forward and contribute generously to new school was soon dashed on the reality of the economic times and regional resentments. A proposal to impose a tax of $2 per year per lodge member caused many protests, despite the fact that Masonic icon Albert Pike chaired the fund raising effort.

In July 1852, the newly created college board of trustees paid $5,500 for 100 acres lying just to the east of the U.S. Arsenal in what is today MacArthur Park. The board intended to develop 40 acres of the tract as the college campus and sell the rest. The land was later platted as the Masonic Addition, one of the early additions annexed to Little Rock.

By the autumn of 1857, the Grand Lodge had accumulated enough money to lay the cornerstone for a large building — which was expected to cost $20,000. Construction was under way by the spring of 1858, with the completion of contracts for stone, bricks, ironwork, lumber, roofing slates and carpentry. With the interior walls still awaiting plastering, the college opened for business with about 50 students on Oct. 10, 1859. The college president was John Baker Thompson, William N. Bronaugh was vice president, and John B. Mills was “drill master.” The school had a military orientation, with cadets wearing “blue uniforms with a light blue stripe, and brass buttons bearing the word ‘cadet’ and the initials of the college…”

The school had little in the way of instructional aids or scientific equipment, but active Mason and political leader Robert W. Johnson gave his private book collection to the school as a nucleus for a library.

The new school put on a brave face as its second session opened in October 1860. An advertisement in the Gazette boasted of “brightening prospects,” and the number of students “far exceeded that of the previous opening.” The five Masonic districts in the state were each authorized to send five pupils free of tuition, but paying students were charged $50 tuition if studying in the preparatory department, or $60 for the collegiate department. An on-site boarding house provided room and board, lights, fuel, and laundry for $15 monthly.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 sent St. Johns’ College into a tailspin from which it never completely recovered. St. Johns’ students volunteered in large numbers for Confederate military service, many joining the Capitol Guard of Little Rock. In a tragic series of events, large numbers of the students and faculty members died in the fratricide of Civil War.

Years after the war, in 1898, a student recalled how college president John B. Thompson assembled the cadets on campus “and in an address to us, calling us ‘young gentlemen,’ he said he was going forward to old Virginia, that would be the battleground of the bloodiest war of modern times, the end of which no human could foretell.” Indeed, Col. Thompson would die at the Battle of Shiloh. The college vice president, Major W.J. Bronaugh — who, like Thompson, was a native of Virginia — met his end at the Battle of Seven Pines during the Peninsula campaign in Virginia.

The “myth of the lost cause” was growing by leaps in 1898 as our now middle-aged St. Johns’ alum recalled how fellow cadets “…taking anything they could get from a stick to an old shot gun and flintlock ride to answer the call to arms.” Cadet Dan Ringo, the son of Arkansas’ first Supreme Court chief justice, Daniel Ringo, was described as “a gallant and splendid young man” before his death early in the war. Carl Hempstead, “the handsomest boy in the school and one of the loveliest all-around characters in the college … yielded up his young manhood at Corinth.”

One St. Johns’ cadet, William F. “Bill” Rector — a venerable name in Little Rock history if ever there were one — was described as “the Prince Rupert of the campus.” The real Rupert, an English Civil War cavalry hero, died an old man, but this early Bill Rector died during the “foolhardy” Confederate attack on Helena in July 1863.

The college building and grounds were used for military hospitals, first under the Confederates, but later the Union army greatly expanded the site, serving more than 8,000 patients by the end of the war. Sometime student David O. Dodd, the youthful Confederate spy, was hanged by Union forces on the college grounds on a cold Jan. 8, 1864.

Efforts to resurrect St. John’ after the war seemed to make progress at first, but the challenges were great. Amazingly, in 1873 the struggling college initiated a legal department, and the faculty included future Attorney General of the United States Augustus H. Garland as well as U.M. Rose, the future American delegate to the Hague International Court. Unfortunately, few students were able to take advantage of the legal department because the college gradually failed. Even accepting female students did not save the day. St. Johns’ closed permanently in 1882.

When the old building burned in January 1890, the Gazette published a puzzling requiem: “The old St. Johns’ College, with its little Gothic spires and castellated towers, a structure that has been an architectural nightmare for six or seven years, awoke from its troubled dream last night, and with a crimson flare, it passed out of existence with greater flourish than the day it was consecrated …”