Qualla: Bridgewater College

Bridgewater College: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Daniel Christian Flory was 26 years old when he opened a school in 1880 above a country store in Spring Creek, Virginia, and called it the Spring Creek Normal and Collegiate Institute. He was a member of the Church of the Brethren, a German Protestant tradition that had emphasized education and pacifism since the early 18th century, and he believed both men and women should attend his school as equals. That alone made the institute a singularity in Virginia. Two years later, the school moved down the road to the small town of Bridgewater, and in 1889 received a state charter under its current name. Bridgewater College became the first four-year coeducational liberal arts college in Virginia - decades before some peer institutions allowed women into the building.

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Bridgewater College: From Country Store to Charter

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Flory had been educated at Juniata College, a Brethren institution in Pennsylvania, and had returned to Virginia determined to bring the same model south. The school he founded in 1880 was tiny - a few students gathering for normal-school instruction and college preparation - but...

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Bridgewater College: A Pacifist College in a Valley of War

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Church of the Brethren, often classified among the historic peace churches alongside Quakers and Mennonites, holds nonresistance as a core principle. Bridgewater College has carried that commitment through its history. In a Shenandoah Valley that hosted some of the Civil War'...

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Bridgewater College: February 1, 2022

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the afternoon of February 1, 2022, campus police officer John Painter, 55, and campus safety officer J.J. Jefferson, 48, responded to a call about a suspicious person on campus. They were partners and best friends, men described by colleagues as the calm center of campus publi...

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Bridgewater College: Returning What Should Not Have Been Taken

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bridgewater is among the colleges working to return Native American funerary belongings and remains that were donated to its collections in earlier decades. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, requires institutions that received federal fun...

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