ALICE LLOYD COLLEGE
I AM NOT A TEACHER, BUT AN AWAKENER ROBERT FROST
Co-founded in 1923 by social reformers Alice
Lloyd and June Buchanan, Alice Lloyd College has provided higher education to
generations of
Kentucky mountain youth. Located in the Knott County Community
of Pippa Passes, the institution was created and initially maintained as
a joint effort
between the two founders and the residents of the
Caney Creek community.
The college evolved
from the Caney Creek Community Center, established
in 1915 as Lloyd's vision of a model
community in Appalachia. By the
early 1920's, however, she and Buchanan, along with community
members, decided to concentrate on mountain leadership training, and
they
founded Caney Junior College in 1923. Students performed chores
to earn tuition and their
room and board. Once they completed their
studies, they were encouraged to return to
lifelong service in the
Kentucky Mountains.
The school survived
the economically difficult decades of the 1930s and
1940s and registered steady gains in
both buildings and enrollment. Most
of the new buildings constructed in this period
were designed by Caney
graduate Commodore Slone.
The institution
reached a number of milestones in the 1950s, including a
new science building,
accreditation by the state board of education,
and the creation
of a nationwide donor
network. For these and other
achievements, Lloyd was honored on the nationally
televised show "This
Is Your Life" on December 7, 1955. The aging Lloyd
gradually turned
over many of her duties to Dean William s. hays and Buchanan, and
began
work on an endowment fund to ensure the survival of the college. After Lloyd's death
in 1962, the school was renamed Alice Lloyd Junior
College. Hays became the school's
first official president. Buchanan
assumed the leadership of the community
center. During Hays' fifteen-year presidency, he emerged as a spokesman for
Appalachian educational
concerns and also carried out an extensive modernization and
building
program.
In 1977 the board
of trustees appointed jerry C. Davis president. Under
Davis and Buchanan, the school
became a four-year college in 1982,
completed a long-range endowment plan, founded the
June Buchanan
School ( a model school for kindergarten through twelfth grade), and
further
expanded the campus physical plant.
At the end of the
1988 school year, the leadership of the institution
changed dramatically. Davis
resigned to accept another position and
June Buchanan died. M. Fred Mullinax, a
former Alice Lloyd vice-
president, became the college's third president and the leader of
the community center. Alice Lloyd College enrollment for the 1970's
averaged five hundred students per year.
Source: The Kentucky Encyclopedia
Author: Stephen Douglas Wilson
Editor: John Kleber
Copyright year: 1992
The University Press of KY