Milestones: Embracing Change

Several businesses in the Springfield community – most instantly recognizable by name, if not also reputation – are reaching significant ages this year, either 50, 100 or 150 years in operation. Springfield Business Journal is checking in with a handful of them in a multipart series called Milestones.

What started as a single, unfinished brick building is now an 88-acre campus marking 150 years in the heart of Springfield.

While gala celebrations are planned for Drury University, such as a Beach Boys concert on Nov. 4, administrators remain focused on a 25-year master plan designed to carry the university’s buildings and grounds through 2042. Drury is also in the midst of a $50 million comprehensive campaign that launched June 1 and runs through 2027, but is already over halfway to its financial target.

Plans call for transformation of campus spaces and programming. A desire for transformation also served as the impetus for the institution.

History 101
Early maps of Springfield show a very different city than that of today.

In the latter part of the 1800s, Springfield extended from its northern limits, located slightly above Commercial Street and the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad, to its southern boundary of Cherry Street.

It was a time when local officials wrestled over which area was the true heart of Springfield: the neighborhood popularly nicknamed Moon City, centered on the bustling C-Street railroad station, or the one known as Queen City, centered on the current city square.

In 1873, a group of New England intellectuals plopped a college squarely between the two contested centers. Drury College – it didn’t become Drury University until 2000 – opened the doors of its single, unfinished brick building on Sept. 25, 1873. That’s when the Rev. Nathan J. Morrison, its first president, rang a borrowed dinner bell to call the first classes into session. As the six faculty members and 39 students tried to focus on their lessons, carpenters and plasterers pounded away in nearby rooms.

The scene is described by William Garvin, director of Drury’s F.W. Olin Library, in “Drury University,” a photographic history released July 31 from Arcadia Publishing.

There wasn’t much around the college aside from scattered farms and scrub brush, but the location was a strategic one, Garvin said.

“Here you had people in Springfield proper saying, ‘You need to come down and start the school here,’ and then the people up by the railroad track saying, ‘No, this is the area – this is where the city’s heading,’” he said. “And what they do is sit it right in the middle. It was a pragmatic decision.”

A healing place
Visitors who aren’t looking for it might miss it, but just in front of Burnham Hall, the building that houses the office of Drury University Interim President John Beuerlein, the lawn has a gentle mound of earth running across it like a scar on the bridge of a prizefighter’s nose.

That long mound is what remains of an entrenchment used by Union soldiers in defense of the city of Springfield during the Civil War. It is marked by a patinated bronze plaque.

The scar that remains in the land is a literal rift from the war, and that’s a potent symbol for Drury, which was established to try and bring about healing.

“A mission of the school was what Rev. Morrison called the silent work of reconciliation,” Garvin said. “It was to basically bring together the fractured populace in this area – ‘to heal the hard wounds of Civil War,’ was what he said.”

While women were always part of the mission of the institution – a summer 1873 newspaper advertisement from the Missouri Weekly Patriot offered “Equal Advantages to both Ladies and Gentlemen” – it would be some time before Black students were admitted. In the period after the Civil War in a place that was divided over the issue of slavery, Morrison knew the founders and their New England-based financial backers, most with abolitionist backgrounds, would have a hard time drumming up support for an institution that was racially integrated.

Garvin’s history relates that although founder Samuel Drury, one of a quartet that included Morrison and brothers James and Charles Harwood, argued for the admission of Black students in 1873, the first African American scholar was not admitted until 1964. That student, James L.H. Williams, graduated in 1967.

Morrison knew the population was equally divided between people with Northern and Southern sympathies, and the task was to get the children of former combatants together in the classroom.

“The hope was that they could learn together, sit together and reason together and be mutually understood,” Garvin said in an interview. “The hope was that would foster this work of reconciliation and reestablishing this national community. This was seen as Christian in the broadest sense: Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Connections continue
Beuerlein, who was installed as Drury’s 19th president in May and is serving in an interim capacity, graduated from Drury with a bachelor’s degree in 1975. He was general partner for Edward Jones in St. Louis and served as a university trustee 1991-2011 before being elected emeritus trustee and later life trustee. He and his wife Crystal, also from the class of 1975, are among the largest donors to the university, according to the Office of Marketing and Communications. He joined the university with the goal of finding the next president after Tim Cloyd’s sudden resignation in March.

Beuerlein’s service to the university may be informed by his work as a financial analyst, but it’s equally shaped by his memories of his undergraduate years.

“Of course, it was the ’70s, so everybody was focused on the Vietnam War,” he said.

“There were a lot of protests. Students were very engaged, and it was just a time of rebellion. There were even campus streakers.”

Students and professors had a distinctive relationship at the time, and Beuerlein noted that continues to this day.

“A lot of places, professors don’t have a chance of knowing all of their students, but here, they do,” he said. “There’s a strong pursuit of the truth here, and a desire for our students to get exposed to ideas, so whatever values or beliefs they bring to the table, they can decide for themselves.

“We’re not trying to drive a program of conservatism or liberalism here; we’re trying to provide a platform for both sides of every issue to be vetted.”

Judy Thompson, retired senior vice president for university advancement, was a first-year student at Drury in the fall of 1957, graduating in 1961. She was invited to work at Drury by William Everheart, who was president from 1971-76, and she had a hand in shaping the institution’s centennial celebration.

Thompson retired from senior administration in 2002, having grown Drury’s endowment from $5 million at her arrival to $116 million at her retirement. She noted several presidents – including Beuerlein currently – have invited her back to work.

“When this is over, I will have retired from Drury six times,” she said.

Thompson said the people are the best part of Drury.

“The people who have graduated from Drury have gone on to make a huge difference in the world, and not just the corporate world – they’ve done important academic work and made impressions on significant issues in the world,” she said.

Some notable alumni include Ernest Breech, former chair of Ford Motor Co.; Johnny Morris, founder and CEO of Bass Pro Shops; Tom Whitlock, Oscar-winning songwriter and lyricist; William Garwood, silent film actor and director; Bob Barker, former game show host and philanthropist for animal causes; Lauren Holtkamp, NBA referee; Bill Virdon, MLB player and manager; and Carlos Hurd, a journalist who gave the first detailed account of the sinking of the Titanic.

Drury by the numbers
The university today sits on 88 urban acres, near the seat of city and county government. Officials haven’t yet released enrollment numbers for fall 2023 except to say that the campus welcomed 424 new students, including 80 transfer students, with the student body hailing from 24 states and 22 countries. Unofficial undergraduate enrollment for fall 2023 is 1,370, according to campus officials.

Drury has been working on increasing enrollment in recent years. Total spring 2023 enrollment, including graduate and undergraduate students, was 1,946, according to Springfield Business Journal list research, down almost 10% from the previous spring.

The university has graduated more than 40,000 students in its 150 years, according to the published history.

U.S. News & World Report puts tuition and fees at $33,830 and the acceptance rate at 66%. Its 2022 rankings put Drury at No. 22 among regional Midwest universities.

The university’s endowment was reported by Data USA to stand at $103 million as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year, with a 35% return and 11% growth year over year.