ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 25, 1996 TAG: 9601250006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BUENA VISTA
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
Mary Gardner Shewey grew up in State College, Pa., a wide-open, bustling university town. So it was quite a change for her when she came to Buena Vista in 1946 to attend Southern Seminary and Junior College, a little school for women on a hill nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
At "The Sem," the young ladies were under the watchful eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Robey, the school's owners and administrators. The rules were strict, even for those days.
On Thursday nights, students had to wear evening dresses to the dining hall.
Every date had to be a double date. And if a young woman wanted to date a local boy, he had to be on the "approved list."
To get on the approved list, the boy and his family had to be known to Mrs. Robey - or he had to come in and present himself for an interview with her.
"The Robeys kept a tight rein on us - but lovingly," Shewey recalls. "The school was their child. And we were all their children."
After a bout of homesickness - something we might call "culture shock" in this day and age - Shewey came to love Southern Seminary and its traditions. And then she fell in love and married a local boy who was, of course, at the top of Mrs. Robey's list.
Mary Shewey never strayed far from Southern Seminary. Today she lives in the brick house her husband built down the street from the college.
But much has changed. Southern Seminary renamed itself Southern Virginia College four years ago - to avoid the confusion of people who thought it was a nunnery. Enrollment has dwindled in the past decade, and, on Jan. 11, the school's trustees bowed to financial realities by voting to close the college at the end of the current school term.
The announcement prompted Shewey and many others to summon their recollections of the school's history - which stretches back 129 years.
They were left with questions: Did it fail to change enough with the times? Or did it change too much?
When they changed the name, Southern Sem "died for me right then," Shewey says.
"I know they were doing what they had to do" to try to survive, she says, but she feels a bit like the alumni of nearby Virginia Military Institute, who are fighting to maintain its all-male status.
"If you've gone through a system," she says, "you sort of hate to see it change."
`They took me on as one of them'
The school got its start 1867 in Bowling Green, Va., as the Home School for Girls, providing elementary and high school classes. It was soon renamed Bowling Green Female Seminary. In those days, "seminary" meant it was a private school for young women, not a religious institution.
In 1901, Dr. Edgar Rowe brought the school to Buena Vista and reopened it in a former hotel under the name Southern Seminary. The Romanesque Buena Vista Hotel was built in the 1890s during a land rush, but quickly closed when the boom fizzled.
Southern Sem's president, Rowe, was a serious man. The girls weren't allowed to date boys or play cards. Their daily lives were supervised by matrons and the dean of students, who was called the "lady principal."
"Dr. Rowe was a Methodist - he didn't believe in dancing," recalls Leona Obenshain Hylton, 93, who graduated from high school at Southern Sem in 1922.
The school provided a protected place for girls to learn in an era when public education was weak and young women often weren't allowed to go far in school.
Leona Hylton boarded a train at a stop at tiny Nace in Botetourt County in 1920 to enroll at Southern Sem. Like all teen-agers leaving home for a new place, she was a bit nervous. But there were other Southern Sem girls on the train from farther south, and they soon realized she was heading for the same place. "From then on," she recalls, "they just took me on as one of them. It was just like a family."
She recalls sitting at the dining-hall table with her teacher and fellow Spanish students. "You only got your food if you asked in Spanish. All your conversations had to be in Spanish. I got to where I was right fluent in that."
Hylton went on to study at the Louisville Conservatory of Music and Radford College, then taught school around the Roanoke Valley for 15 years before leaving teaching to help her husband run Round Hill Dairy Farm. Hylton, who still lives in Botetourt, says that when she heard the news about Southern Sem's demise, "I was about ready to cry. I'm still ready to cry."
`We were all their children'
Rowe's stewardship gave way after two decades in Buena Vista. In 1919, Dr. R.L. Durham bought a half-share in the college, followed by his son-in-law, H. Russell Robey, who bought out Rowe's other half in 1922.
The Robey and Durham families loosened the rules a bit. Students could date and even dance - but under strict supervision.
In 1924, the school added two years of college to the high school coursework and changed its name to Southern Seminary and Junior College.
By the time Mary Shewey arrived in 1946, first-year college students were allowed to stay out until 11 on Friday and Saturday nights.
Russell Robey was running the business side of the college; his wife, Dr. Margaret Durham Robey, oversaw academics.
"She was just a tip-top president - somebody to respect and look up to," Shewey recalls. "If Mrs. Robey did it, it was OK to do."
It was a place, Shewey recalls, for "furthering your knowledge of the social graces." If you went to Lexington on a date - chaperoned, of course - with a boy from Washington and Lee or VMI, you were expected to wear a hat, gloves and high heels.
But it was more than a rich-girl's finishing school. It was a place to brush up on your academic weaknesses. Shewey got lots of personal help in improving her math. Her graduation yearbook, "The Maid of the Mountains 1948," describes her as a "Typical Southern Seminary Girl" with a "knockout personality."
Her plan had been to go to Southern Sem for two years, then transfer back home to Penn State. But then she met and married Emmett Shewey, and that was that.
If Mrs. Robey was the girls' paragon of good taste, then Russell Robey was the enforcer of good behavior.
"They tell stories of how the VMI and W&L boys would get out of hand at a dance - and he'd whip 'em and throw 'em out. Physically whip 'em," says W.T. "Pete" Robey, a Buena Vista attorney and the Robeys' nephew. "He didn't fool with police. He took care of it himself. He was a horse - big at heart."
Doug Harwood, a Washington and Lee grad who is now editor of the Rockbridge Advocate, recalls the college's Main Building - where most students were housed - as being protected by an elaborate alarm system. It meant that half the fun was "figuring out how to get around it all. Girls would climb out the window. Guys would trigger an alarm in one part of the building and try to sneak in another."
He recalls going to Southern Sem one evening in 1970 to "troll" for a date. He was met by Russell Robey, then near retirement but nevertheless presenting an intimidating countenance. "Who are you here for, young man?'' Robey demanded.
Still, Harwood came to find that Robey was "a nice old guy" who did a lot for the community. And despite its cloistered setting up on a hill, he says, the college did reach out to the community.
For nearly five decades - including just last month - the school has presented a "Horses' Christmas" for townfolk. Just before the holiday, the students and staffers would dress up - and dress their horses as reindeer and the like - and hold a parade through Buena Vista. The event would end at a huge tree on campus that was decorated with apples and carrots for the horses.
"It didn't matter how jaded you were," Harwood says. "There was just something really charming, heartwarming and sweet about it."
Sometimes the real world intruded in bizarre ways on the school on the hill.
One graduation day in the late 1970s, parents and students were dressed in the usual finery and enjoying a perfect spring day. Suddenly, the mood was broken by two beat-up pickup trucks that came roaring into town and screeched to a halt at the bottom of the hill. Pete Robey, Buena Vista's former commonwealth's attorney, says the occupants jumped out - brandishing shotguns and other weapons with which they preceded to blast away at each other.
"Nobody got hurt," recalls Harwood, who was a radio reporter at the time. "When the two feuding clans ran out of ammunition, they just jumped back in their pickups and roared off."
`The handwriting's been on the wall'
Russell Robey ran an efficient institution in his half century as business manager. He took the table scraps from the dining hall and fed them to hogs he raised behind the college. Eventually the leftover-fattened pork would find its way onto the students' plates.
For years, Pete Robey says, Southern Sem "made money, and it made good money. My aunt and uncle poured it back into the school."
In 1958, the Robeys turned ownership over to the board of trustees and the college became a nonprofit institution. But the Robeys continued to run things - Margaret Robey as president until 1968, and Russell Robey as treasurer until 1971.
The college's enrollment stayed near 300 into the early 1980s. But then things took a turn for the worse. There was less demand for women's colleges and residential junior colleges. And because it had been a for-profit school for so many of its years, the college had never built a tradition of fund-raising.
Pete Robey, who served on the board of trustees for several years, says finances worsened in the 1980s as enrollment dropped.
"The demand just wasn't there," he says. "It had become a dinosaur. The handwriting's been on the wall for seven or eight years."
The school tried to fight. It expanded its academic offerings to include business, early childhood education and the only academic major in equine studies in the nation. In 1992, it hired Col. John W. Ripley as president and changed its name to Southern Virginia College - in the hope that a less religious-sounding identity would make recruiting easier.
Despite the changes, it remained one of the more tradition-bound private colleges in the state. It still has a number of formal dances, names a May Court of princesses, and maintains curfews for freshmen - although 12:30 a.m. on weekdays and 2 a.m. on weekends is a far cry from the old days.
Under Ripley, the college doubled its fund raising. But it wasn't enough. Enrollment - which nosedived to a low of 127 last year and edged back up to 165 this year - has been stuck far below the break-even point. The college's debts grew to about $4.3 million.
In the end, the money crunch cost the school its accreditation, and the trustees voted unanimously to close.
They're holding out a reed of hope that they can reverse the decision - if they can come up with a multimillion-dollar gift from an alumna, or create a new program with a different mission.
Many current students were devastated by the decision to close. Rhea Knight, a second-year student from Washington, D.C., says she understands how some high school seniors might be turned off by the idea of going to an all-women's college. But the academic programs at Southern Virginia were strong and, once she visited the campus, she was hooked. "No matter how stressed and upset you are - you look out your window and it's beautiful."
`I'm hoping for something good'
What will happen now is anybody's guess. There's no more demand these days for a resort hotel in Buena Vista than there was after the land boom bottomed out in the 1890s. Pete Robey wonders if the best bet would be to ask the state to take over and start a public college program.
Mary Shewey thinks it would be nice to turn it into an extension campus for James Madison University. "I just tell myself that, by golly, all is not lost," Shewey says. "I'm hoping for something good up there on the hill."
She's seen students come and go - including her daughter, a 1980 graduate - along with many of the traditions from bygone days.
But too much of her life has been wrapped up in Southern Seminary - and she's too big a booster for Buena Vista - not to remember it all fondly. "I go into my dinning room and look out the window and watch my birds and look at The Sem. It's a grand old building."
She's now voter registrar in this mountain city of 6,000, a local fixture who went to her first fireman's ball with her husband-to-be 48 years ago and hasn't missed many since, even after his death a few years ago.
"The Sem" brought her here, and she says she'll never leave.
"You measure success by how far you go after school," she says with a laugh. "I got one block."
LENGTH: Long : 238 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Cindy Pinkston. 1. The Main Hall of Southern Virginiaby CNBCollege - built in the 1890s as the Buena Vista Hotel - includes
administrative offices, a cafeteria and dorm rooms. 2. Lorraine
Kleeberger, a third year senior at the college, is pictured in the
lobby of the Main Hall. 3. Mary Gardner Shewey, a 1948 Southern
Seminary graduate, lives just a block from the college (at right in
background) in Buena Vista. 4. Leona Obenshain Hylton, 93, who
graduated from high school at Southern Sem in 1922, holds a
photograph taken of her in 1921 while she attened the school. Hylton
boarded a train at a stop at tiny Nace in Botetourt County in 1920
to enroll at Southern Sem. Like all teenagers leaving home for a new
place, she was a bit nervous. But there were other Southern Sem
girls on the train from farther south, and they soon realized she
was heading for the same place. "From then on, she recalls, "they
just took me on as one of them. It was just like a family." color.
5. Hylton also supplied the panoramic photo of the student body
(above), taken when she attened The Sem in
the early 1920s. 6. Life at The Sem. Pictures on a 1925 yearbook
page (left) show a typical classroom from the early 1900s and young
equestrians from when the school was located in Bowling Green, Va.
The School's equestrian tradition has remained strong through the
present day.