October 19, 1997|By Mary Breslin. Special to the Tribune.
Students moving into dormitories at Elmhurst College this fall brought along the usual array of electronic wizardry to make learning and living easier. But when the school first opened 125 years ago as a proseminary and prep school for future preachers and teachers of the German Evangelical Church, it was a spartan existence by comparison.
Elmhurst Proseminary's first president, Rev. Carl Kranz, and 14 young men moved into a sprawling farmhouse on the site where the school's student union now stands. Classes were held on the first floor, Kranz and his family lived upstairs, and the boys bunked in the attic.
According to Melitta J. Cutright's "An Ever-Widening Circle: The Elmhurst College Years," in a short period of time, 10 more students enrolled and the one-room attic was a crowded dorm by any standards.
The wake-up call on school days was 5:30 a.m., and lights were out by 10 p.m. In addition to classes, music lessons and religious services, the young men tended the farm, chopped wood for fuel and pumped water from the well for drinking, cooking and laundry.
Education was a bargain: For the first 40 years, the school charged $150 a year to teach, feed and house the students.
The campus was off-limits to young women, and excursions to town were outlawed. So school officials were puzzled when some of their students eventually married local girls.