Stories & Resources

A native of Maine, Alice Staples Dow moved with her husband to Emory & Henry College in 1947, when he joined the faculty teaching Sociology. Mrs. Dow then attended and graduated from Emory & Henry. She continued her education in the fields of business and accounting, earning her Ph.D. When Dr. Dow retired from Emory & Henry in 1981, she was chair of the Department of Business and Economics.

Describing herself as “Queen of the College,” Claudia Duffy worked at Emory & Henry from 1991 through 2014, serving most of those years as the Administrative Assistant to two Deans of Students.

Over the generations, many people have made possible Emory & Henry College and its distinctive learning community. For those employed at Emory & Henry, this has been demanding work. Working at Emory & Henry was a whole-family undertaking. One such family member was Dorothy “Dot” Culberson.

Elizabeth Henry Campbell Russell was a courageous woman who defied expectations. Born in Hanover County, Virginia, on July 10, 1749, Elizabeth “Betsy” Henry was a child of privilege whose family had access to power and prestige in Colonial Virginia.

Lillie Belle Boyd Gibbs was born in January 1865, into slavery in Smyth County, Virginia. Toward the end of her life, Mrs. Gibbs told a reporter that her uncle had brought her to Emory when she was six months old.

Since before its founding, many hundreds of people have fulfilled the daily, ordinary work that keeps Emory & Henry going. In the earliest years, working at the college involved farming, washing laundry, cleaning, cooking, serving meals, carpentry, masonry, stoking furnaces, and cleaning sooty chimneys. Over the centuries we have sometimes forgotten that these people have lives and families and communities beyond the responsibilities they take up on the Emory & Henry campus. One such person is Squire Miller Henry.

Because the Virginia & Tennessee railroad was not completed until October 1856, when David Earhart arrived at Emory & Henry a few days before the start of school in August 1853, he likely came by stagecoach from his home near Christiansburg, Montgomery County, Virginia. The stagecoach would have deposited Earhart where the road over the ridge to Emory intersected with the main road and he would have walked over the hill. The College, the largest structure anywhere around, was probably the first thing he saw.