Qualla: West Virginia Wesleyan College

West Virginia Wesleyan College: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carson Maynard / (WT-en) Haem85 at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 1.0. Ted Cassidy was eight feet tall in the popular imagination - he was actually six-foot-nine - and when he answered the door of the Addams family mansion on television in 1964, his single growled word ('You rang?') and his hooded eyes made him instantly recognizable across America. Cassidy had come to that role by way of West Virginia Wesleyan College, which he attended from 1948 to 1950. He was one of the more eccentric figures in a roster of Wesleyan alumni that includes a Hall of Fame football coach, a cell biologist who now runs cancer research at Dana-Farber, novelists, poets, judges, bishops, and several professional athletes. The school itself - founded in 1890 in Buckhannon, on a 100-acre campus of Georgian-brick buildings - has been quietly turning out distinctive graduates from this small Methodist liberal-arts college for 136 years.

Image: Carson Maynard / (WT-en) Haem85 at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 1.0

West Virginia Wesleyan College: Founded by Methodists

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NKS22, Public domain. West Virginia Wesleyan was founded in 1890 by the West Virginia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which wanted an institution to educate Methodist youth and to train Methodist clergy for service in the state. The first president, Bennett W. Hutchinson, was a gr...

Image: NKS22 | Public domain

West Virginia Wesleyan College: The Campus

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fryeguy91, CC BY-SA 3.0. The campus is one of the more architecturally coherent in West Virginia. Twenty-three major Georgian-style brick buildings, mostly constructed between the 1910s and the 1950s, sit on a hundred acres of park-like grounds on the north side of Buckhannon. The signature building is W...

Image: Fryeguy91 | CC BY-SA 3.0

West Virginia Wesleyan College: What the College Does

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Haem85 at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 1.0. About 1,055 students attend Wesleyan, drawn from 35 states and 26 countries. Roughly 80 percent of the faculty have doctorates or terminal degrees in their fields; the student-faculty ratio is 11.6 to 1; the average class has 15 students. The college offers more than 50 undergrad...

Image: User: (WT-shared) Haem85 at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 1.0

West Virginia Wesleyan College: The Bobcats

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Valerius Tygart, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wesleyan competes as the Bobcats in NCAA Division II, fielding 21 varsity teams in the Mountain East Conference. The list runs through the standard college sports - basketball, baseball, soccer, track, swimming, tennis, volleyball, lacrosse - plus football, which has been the hea...

Image: Valerius Tygart | CC BY-SA 3.0

West Virginia Wesleyan College: Alumni You Might Recognize

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wvfunnyman, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beyond the football names and Ted Cassidy, Wesleyan has produced an unusual concentration of figures in literature, science, and public life. Denise Giardina, whose novels Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth dramatize the coal-country labor wars of the early twentieth century, ...

Image: Wvfunnyman | CC BY-SA 3.0