The area where Hollins College developed was the site of
Botetourt Springs. The area developed as a resort which operated from 1820 to 1841. It then became the site of a short-lived seminary, whose property and buildings were acquired by Valley Union Seminary.
1842–1855: Valley Union Seminary and Charles Lewis Cocke The institution of higher learning that would become Hollins was first established in 1842 by the Reverend Joshua Bradley, a Baptist minister, as the coeducational Valley Union Seminary. Bradley left in 1845 for
Missouri, and in 1846, the seminary's trustees hired a 25-year-old math instructor from
Richmond named Charles Lewis Cocke to direct the institution. The same year, Cocke established the first school for enslaved people in the Roanoke area; many students at the school worked at the seminary. In 1851, Cocke abolished the men's department of the institution, and in 1852, the school became a
women's college called the Roanoke Female Seminary. In 1855,
Lynchburg residents John and Ann Halsey Hollins gave $5,000, and the school was renamed Hollins Institute.
Slaves and servants Before the
Civil War, Hollins used the labor of
enslaved people to build and maintain the grounds. In addition, many students brought "servants" with them who were likely slaves. After
slavery was abolished, Hollins employed many formerly enslaved people, mostly women whose names were not recorded. Students were encouraged to ignore these workers in the college handbook during this era, and employees were forbidden from developing friendly relationships with women studying at Hollins.
1855–1870s: Family institution As the head of Hollins, Cocke saw his students as a part of a family and himself as their father figure. His
pedagogy was based upon the "southern sensibility that a lady was to be trained to submit to the order of men". Though he thought women studying at Hollins were best confined to domestic duties, he still placed great value on intellectual excellence.
1880s–1901 The Hollins of Cocke's ambitions was limited by region, as Cocke was interested in educating women only from
Southern states. Because of this limited scope, Hollins struggled to "professionalize" in the 1880s and beyond. Its remote location far from the better respected and funded men's institutions put Hollins in contrast with the
Seven Sisters in the Northeast. Despite its academic rigor, Hollins and other southern women's colleges were smaller and poorer than women's college such as
Smith College and
Mount Holyoke in the north. However, Hollins saw its enrollment rise in the last two decades of the 19th century. "Miss Matty," as she preferred to be called, was intent on preserving the "genteel" atmosphere her father had cultivated at Hollins. Though she was a "charismatic leader" Miss Cocke was not interested in waging any battles for women's education; indeed, she let her nephews, Joseph Turner and M. Estes Cocke, handle the school's financial dealings entirely. Miss Cocke shared the opinion of President John McBryde of
Sweet Briar Women's College, who in 1907 decried the "independence" sought by
Vassar and other members of the Seven Sisters and suggested instead that women's education focus on "grace [and] refinement". In 1911, the school was renamed Hollins College. Further stalling Hollins' prosperity was President Matty Cocke's distaste for
fundraising. The Cocke family agreed to turn over ownership if sufficient funds were raised in 1925, but the
Depression slowed their efforts. A scathing 1930 letter from alumna Eudora Ramsay Richardson in the
South Atlantic Quarterly indicted the
American Association of University Women for regional bias. Richardson's letter and prompting from the presidents of
Mount Holyoke and
Bryn Mawr sped up the accreditation process. The Cocke family turned the school over to a board of trustees and President Cocke tendered her resignation in 1932, as the school finally gained accreditation.
1933–present Hollins was home to the first exhibition gallery in the Roanoke region in 1948. In 1950 when he was 31 years of age
John R. Everett was elected President of Hollins College, a position he held until he resigned in 1960. One of the first writer-in-residence programs in America began at Hollins in 1959. Hollins was home to the first graduate program focusing on the writing and study of children's literature, established in 1993. Hollins University Quadrangle is on the
National Register of Historic Places.The institution was renamed Hollins College in 1911, and in 1998 it became Hollins University. In April 2019, the president directed the temporary removal of four volumes of the university yearbook from the library's
digital commons after the
2019 blackface controversy involving Virginia Governor
Ralph Northam. The four volumes (1915, 1950, 1969, 1985) contained photographs of students wearing
blackface. The university issued a statement saying access to the digitized yearbooks would be restored as soon as the university developed accompanying "educational information regarding the history and practice of blackface to help all of us understand why it is a racist and prejudicial practice." The removal was criticized by the
Society of American Archivists, the
American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, and the
Virginia Library Association. The digitized volumes were still available on the Internet Archive, and all physical copies of the yearbooks were also available in the library. The Wyndham Robertson Library and the Working Group on Slavery issued a statement in response objecting to the decision, stating that, "we cannot and do not support any erasure of institutional history, even if only temporarily" and recommended that the affected yearbooks be made electronically accessible again along with a statement on the content. Access to the four digitized volumes was restored on April 9, less than one week after their removal along with the added educational content.
Mary Dana Hinton became the thirteenth president of Hollins University on August 1, 2020. She is the first African American president in the university's history. ==Campus==