Qualla: Sweet Briar College

Sweet Briar College: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bst9jkj, CC0. On March 3, 2015, the board of directors of Sweet Briar College announced that the school would close at the end of the academic year. Insurmountable financial challenges, they said. Declining enrollment. The end of an era. Within seventy-two hours, alumnae who had not spoken since graduation were calling each other. By the end of the week, a fundraising campaign called Saving Sweet Briar had raised over a million dollars and hired a lawyer. By June, the president had resigned, thirteen of the directors were gone, the courts had blocked the closure, and a new board was unanimously voting to keep the doors open. The college that almost ended in 2015 is the same college whose first 51 students arrived in 1906. The throughline is a grief that no parent ever fully recovers from.

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Image: Bst9jkj | CC0

Sweet Briar College: Daisy

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No photographer credited, Public domain. Maria Georgiana Williams was born in 1867. Her parents called her Daisy. She grew up at Sweet Briar plantation in Amherst County, the only child of Indiana Fletcher Williams and James Henry Williams. She died at sixteen, in 1884, of an illness that letters from the period describ...

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Image: No photographer credited | Public domain

Sweet Briar College: The Plantation Before the College

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bakerphotos, CC BY-SA 4.0. The land Sweet Briar sits on was the working plantation of the Fletcher family for more than fifty years before it became a campus. Elijah Fletcher and his descendants used enslaved labor to run the property. After emancipation in 1865, several formerly enslaved people and their ...

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Image: Bakerphotos | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sweet Briar College: Ralph Adams Cram's Quad

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ann Marshall Whitley, Public domain. When the college formally opened in 1906, the architecture was the work of Ralph Adams Cram, whose name appears on the campuses of Princeton and West Point. Cram's signature style was Gothic Revival, but at Sweet Briar he chose Colonial Revival - red brick buildings with white ba...

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Image: Ann Marshall Whitley | Public domain

Sweet Briar College: The Fight to Stay Open

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit formulanone, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 2015 the endowment had slipped from $96 million to $84 million. Enrollment was down. The board, citing $25 million in bond debt and an inevitable insolvency, voted unanimously to close. The response was almost immediate: faculty passed a vote of no confidence in the board, alu...

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Image: formulanone | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sweet Briar College: After the Save

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No photographer credited, Public domain. Sweet Briar reorganized its curriculum in 2018 into three centers - Engineering, Science and Technology in Society; Human and Environmental Sustainability; and Creativity, Design and the Arts. It became the second women's college in the country to offer an ABET-accredited enginee...

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Image: No photographer credited | Public domain