On December 2, 1905, two Baptist associations - Kings Mountain in Cleveland County, Sandy Run in Rutherford County - chartered Boiling Springs High School. The town's Baptist Church donated its old church house, five acres of land, and $2,700 to launch the institution. The location was practical: it straddled the border of the sponsoring associations and was close to brick clay for construction. Willard Winslow Washburn, who first proposed the idea and signed the certificate of incorporation, would serve on the board of trustees for thirty years. J.D. Huggins became the first principal in 1907. Tuition that fall was $76.05 for a nine-month term. Classes started in October 1907, though the main building - eventually called the Huggins-Curtis Building - wasn't finished. Students lived with families in town and used a nearby elementary school until 1908. That original main building burned down in 1957.

The school became Boiling Springs Junior College on September 3, 1928 - just before the Great Depression hit and nearly closed it. Loyal supporters kept it open. One of the first graduating classes included W. J. Cash, who would write *The Mind of the South*, a foundational study of Southern culture published in 1941. In 1942 Governor O. Max Gardner began pouring his own time and money into rescuing the institution, and the trustees voted that June to rename the school Gardner-Webb Junior College in honor of him and his wife, Fay Webb-Gardner. A $300,000 fundraising campaign followed; by year-end the trustees announced the school was debt-free. Postwar growth came next. New buildings, more students. The name changed to Gardner-Webb College in 1969, the institution earned full senior college accreditation in 1971, and a graduate program started in 1980. University status was approved in 1991 and took effect in January 1993.

The Gardner-Webb campus sits on 225 acres in Boiling Springs, in the Blue Ridge foothills roughly between Charlotte and Asheville. The oldest surviving building is E.B. Hamrick Hall, built in the 1920s as a memorial to students who died in World War I. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. In 2021 the building was rededicated to honor all Gardner-Webb students and alumni who died in any military service since World War I. Today Hamrick Hall houses the Godbold College of Business. In 2021 the university bought nearly two acres in Boiling Springs to build an outdoor amphitheater complex; the state allocated $500,000 toward the project in July 2022. Off-campus, GWU also operates a satellite location in Charlotte.

In February 2014, alumnus Cody Sanders - an openly gay Baptist minister - was invited back to campus to speak about his book *Queer Lessons for Churches on the Straight and Narrow*. The invitation drew sharp criticism from conservative Baptists, including a letter in *The Biblical Recorder* titled "Where are the wise at Gardner-Webb?" The university president at the time, Frank Bonner, responded with a statement affirming the institution's position that marriage is between one man and one woman, while also defending the speaker series itself as appropriate to academic life. The episode captured the long argument Gardner-Webb has been having with itself about being both a Baptist school and a contemporary university - a balance many religious institutions try to strike, and few find easy. In 2009 the university had separated from direct governance by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, gaining the right to select its own trustees while remaining affiliated with the convention.

Gardner-Webb's athletic teams compete as the Runnin' Bulldogs in NCAA Division I - mostly in the Big South Conference, with swimming in the Coastal Collegiate Sports Association and wrestling in the Southern Conference. The school colors are scarlet, black, and white; the first reported bulldog mascot dates to 1922. Recent live mascots have included Butch, Chins, Victor, Barney, Roebuck, and the current English bulldog named Bo. Notable alumni include Sara McMann, who won an Olympic silver medal in wrestling in 2004 and went on to a UFC career; Mallory Weggemann, a Paralympic gold medalist swimmer; novelist and poet Ron Rash; small forward John Drew, who played for the Atlanta Hawks; Linda Combs, controller of the federal Office of Management and Budget under three presidents; and Mason Miller, currently pitching for the San Diego Padres. The school of 3,000 students has produced an unusually long list of people who left Boiling Springs and did something specific somewhere else.