Published March 15, 2025
By Joseph Newkirk
As the United States approached the year 1900 and the beginning of a new century, national optimism peaked, with newspaper headlines and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair proclaiming this would be the “American Century.” Profound changes swept across the country, and educational reform led the way. With a population of nearly 14,000, Quincy stood on the western frontier as Illinois’ second largest city behind Chicago, and since 1860 had been the home of St. Francis Solanus College (SFSC), a Franciscan high school and junior college. Although Catholic, conservative, and steeped in the German educational method of classical instruction, this institution, which in 1917 changed its name to Quincy College, staved off decline and possible closure by shifting its academic focus at the turn of the century.
Scientific advancements were transforming American life, and SFSC began offering chemistry courses taught by Professor William Timpe. Intriguingly, he began his 40-year career at the college teaching natural philosophy, a non-scientific field speculating about the unity of nature and spirit. SFSC also added physics to its curriculum (which had long included speculative metaphysics). These courses later achieved acclaim when Fr. Adrian Schmitt built the first local wireless receiving apparatus and brought Quincy into the age of radio. Biology, too, began flourishing at the college. When E.A. Cameron, Exchange Educator of the Buffalo (New York) Courier toured the college, he told the May 27, 1905 Quincy Daily Journal that Professor Fr. Beirne “ranks the highest in the world in this line of work [studying] insect life under the microscope.”
Languages moved from the widespread use of Latin and classical languages to English for oral and written communication. During the late 19th century, St. Francis Solanus College required Latin and Greek courses and a third of the faculty taught languages other than English: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, and French. During a student assembly in 1900, Joseph Schlarmann read an essay in Latin to an audience expected to understand it. The school’s paper, College Chronicle, only switched from printing its editions in Latin to English in 1904. Also, although the Roman Catholic Church deemed Latin its official language, many local students came from German-speaking immigrant families and priests often delivered homilies in German. Linguistic entanglements plagued life at SFSC in its earlier years.
One of the professors promoting English and transforming SFSC into a modern academic institution was Charles Perkins MacHugh, who during his 30 years on the faculty taught English and theater. He also organized the literary, debating, and dramatic clubs, started the college magazine, Solarian, and directed many plays in the school’s 1,300-seat Performance Hall. MacHugh became renowned for his theatrical skills and staged an annual Shakespearean play and, in English translation, Greek dramas, as well as contemporary ones by Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, among many others. The present-day college theater is named after Professor MacHugh.
During the era of mass European immigration between 1850 and 1900, about 150 Catholic colleges opened in the U.S., and less than one- third survived. In an effort to keep remaining schools afloat in the new century, a nation-wide conference of Catholic educators met in Chicago in 1899. As reported in the April 15,1899 Quincy Daily Journal, Dr. Conaty of Washington D.C.’s Catholic University “declared it to be the most important conference of Catholic educators ever held in America, or indeed in the world.” Fr. Nicholas Leonard, president of SFSC, and Fr. Brennan of Quincy’s St. Rose of Lima Church attended. Brennan told the paper “Many of the advanced thinkers said that the discipline had been too strict in the past and the lighter side of life too little cultivated. Catholic colleges have been very backward in allowing or promoting athletics.”
In response, St. Francis Solanus College’s baseball and football teams began playing in organized leagues and formed an Athletic Club. This branching into sports proved easier for SFSC than many colleges, with its honoring of the classical ideal “Mens sana in corpore sano”—“a healthy mind in a healthy body.” Before the school built the middle section of Francis Hall, this area was a swimming pool for priests and students. Soon the college added tennis, basketball and bowling to its athletic offerings.
At this Catholic conference, speakers noted that one of the appeals of “Protestant” colleges is their inclusion of social activities. SFSC took the cue and by the following year had seven societies on campus, a Glee Club, and a Drum, Fife, and Bugle Corps. Since its founding, SFSC only admitted Catholic boys and men; women would not enter until 1932 after enrollment declined during the Great Depression. However, the all-female St. Mary’s Academy, established in 1866 as a high school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, prepared young women for managing households and involvement in cultural and social events. This school formed a Young Ladies Solidarity with the college and students often socialized together. And while authorities forbade dancing, chaperoned events, and imposed a strict curfew, men and women got together for sporting events, picnics, and even day trips to Siloam Springs.
From its humble beginnings in a three-story wooden building near 8th and Maine, with two Franciscans and three seminarians instructing 65 boarders and 45 day students, SFSC had become by the turn of the 20th century “The Pride of the Prairie.” While maintaining a Franciscan and Catholic foundation, the school followed national trends and dovetailed contemporary scientific, literary, and social pursuits into its curriculum. By emphasizing career preparation in its mission statement, the college helped students, in the words of its 1898 catalog, “form a character which will enable them to pass through life as fruitful children of the church and as useful members of society.” While seven out of ten Catholic colleges folded during the second half of the 19th century, St. Francis Solanus College, which became a four-year college in 1930 and today is known as Quincy University, enters its 165th year as an institution of higher education.
Joseph Newkirk is a local writer and photographer whose work has been widely published as a contributor to literary magazines, as a correspondent for Catholic Times, and for the past 23 years as a writer for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. He is a member of the reorganized Quincy Bicycle Club and has logged more than 10,000 miles on bicycles in his life.
Sources:
“Catholics.” Quincy Daily Journal, April 15, 1899, 7.
“City News.” Quincy Daily Journal, May 27, 1905, 7.
“The Exercises at St. Francis.” Quincy Daily Herald, June 21, 1900, 3.
People’s History of Quincy and Adams County: A Sesquicentennial. Rev. Landry Genosky, ed. Quincy, IL: Jost & Kiefer Printing Co., 217-18.
Quincy and Adams County History and Representative Men, Vol 1. David F. Wilcox, ed. Chicago and New York: Lewis Pub. Co, 1919, 558-60.
Quincy College Centennial:1860 to 1960. Quincy, IL: Quincy Herald-Whig Publishers,1960, 8, 18-19, 24-25.
“St. Francis College.” Quincy Daily Journal, Aug. 18, 1898, 8.
Zimmerman, Joseph. A Story of Quincy University: Catholic, Franciscan, Beginning Again: The First 150 Years. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Co. Publishers, 2010, 30-33.
