A Hidden Academic Gem

Like a hidden gem, Southern Virginia University sits nestled at the southern tip of the storied Shenandoah valley. Established as Southern Virginia College in 1996, the full story behind this home for enthusiastic learners and committed professors actually began just after the Civil War.

by Sanneke Taylor

Introduction

In 1867 The Home School for Girls was founded in Bowling Green, Virginia. Twenty-three years later, another small Virginia town, Buena Vista, was preparing itself for an expected iron boom. Some predicted that the mining industry would transform it into the next Chicago. In preparation, they built a luxury hotel on a prominent hill on the north end of Buena Vista, where visitors could take in the stunning mountain view.

However, within a few years, it became clear that the iron boom was not to be. They sold the failing hotel to Edgar Rowe, who moved The Home School for Girls (by then renamed Bowling Green Female Seminary) into it. Rowe again changed the name, this time to Southern Seminary.

Over the following 50 years, individuals including Robert Lee Durham and H. Russell Robey expanded Southern Seminary, transitioning to a college program by the 1960s. But in the 1980s, a short 20 years later, enrollment was dwindling, and the future of Southern Seminary began to dim. In 1994 male students were permitted to enroll, but it was not enough to reverse the decline. By 1996 Southern Seminary lost its regional accreditation.

In 1996 Glade Knight led a group of individuals to renew the school and take it in a new direction. They purchased Southern Seminary, renaming it Southern Virginia College, and established it as a four-year college focused on the liberal arts, aligned with the values of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The history of Southern Seminary preceded their endeavor, but the enormous task of essentially building a college from scratch still laid ahead.

This article is the first in a series chronicling stories from Southern Virginia University’s earliest days, told through the eyes of individuals who contributed to its success. A factual history of the university’s development can be found online. However, many of the stories that bring that history to life have remained unrecorded. This series will offer a glimpse into the rich history Southern Virginia University has fostered in its short 26 years.

Chapter 1

When Dr. Joseph Bouchelle came to work at Southern Virginia College in 1997 as an admissions counselor, he didn’t expect to find himself in the role of registrar a few years later. When he received the request to fill the position, Bouchelle recalls responding, “I don’t even know what a registrar is.” But he took on the challenge and worked in that capacity for seven years. His willingness to adapt and meet the needs ahead of him captures the dedication that characterized so many of Southern Virginia University’s employees as people who were willing to work wherever was needed to provide a quality education for their students.

Dr. Joseph Bouchelle recalls learning that his friend Walter Ralls was the first dean of admissions at Southern Virginia College in 1996. At the time, Dr. Bouchelle had been teaching for eight years at Fork Union Military Academy, a private high school halfway between Richmond and Charlottesville. The academy treated him and his family well, providing a beautiful, spacious home for them to live in. He and his family were happy there. “I’ll never forget, I came to work one day, and this friend of mine said, ‘Hey, did you hear about that new Mormon school down in Buena Vista?'” Bouchelle responded he had not, so his friend showed him an article in the newspaper about the new Southern Virginia College. He was excited to see that this kind of school had opened, but the thought of working there did not occur to him.

Shortly afterward, Walter Ralls tried to persuade him to work at the new university, but Dr. Bouchelle wasn’t interested in taking the offer. After several months of trying to get him to take a position as an admissions counselor, Ralls finally persuaded him to at least come to an open house to see the school.

Dr. Bouchelle did attend the open house. Sitting in the back of Main Hall’s ballroom, he had his day planner out, distracting himself with a list of all the things he had to do once he declined the job. But his attention was piqued by the answer a student, Dallas Clark, gave when someone asked if students needed a car to be at SVU. Clark described walking into the dormitory hall asking if anyone wanted to make a trip to Walmart, and friends would pile into one of their cars for the trip. It was just as if they were all family.

“And then another guy named Ross Wall…he kind of got really serious. He said, ‘You’ve got to understand something. There’s a really special spirit here. And maybe if you can’t feel that spirit, you just need to put your pens down and feel that spirit.’ I’d been writing my little list, and I felt like he was just talking [to me].” At that moment, Bouchelle felt a spiritual prompting urging him to act on his feelings. “I took the job, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Working at the new Southern Virginia College brought many challenges unique to a startup school, but Dr. Bouchelle remembers those years with fondness. “It was fun. It was just fun. I was working with my dear friend Walt … and in June as an admissions counselor in a struggling startup school. It’s crazy, but it was fun. And it wasn’t like we were under lots of pressure. We just wanted to do well.”

As an admissions counselor, he had ample opportunities to work with the college president, David Farrell, to find ways to bring students to the school. “This is why I love SVU because this is the kind of place it was. After meeting with President Farrell], we went to Walt’s office, and we knelt down, and we prayed. We said, ‘Heavenly Father, we’ve got to figure out something.’ The first year we had 74 students. And we really needed to break 100–that was the goal.”

“We got up from the prayer, and I honestly don’t remember who said it first, but we had the idea of EFY counselors…And so we got this crazy idea of having full scholarships for EFY counselors.”

Especially For Youth (EFY) is a summer camp for youth members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their friends. Many EFY leaders are young adults who work as volunteers. Scholarships for EFY counselors would attract just the kind of service-oriented people who would help build up Southern Virginia College.

“At the time, it seemed crazy, and that’s how we got people who started the chamber choir and started [the tradition of] singing Shenandoah…it just got this momentum going that got us through those first couple years.”

Dr. Bouchelle remembers that the foremost thought on his mind during those first crucial years was helping Southern Virginia College survive. Like the others working with him, he trusted that the school would blossom into something greater, but the day-to-day was busy. However, the defining feature of this time was an overwhelming feeling of unity with his colleagues. “It was just [like] a family. Everything was family.”

While Dr. Bouchelle was initially hired to help with admissions, he also got involved with sports. He coached the first year of the men’s soccer team. Speaking of the struggle to make those teams a successful experience for the students, he says, “We had nothing…there were literally two vans: the white van and the red van…I just still can’t imagine how we did it.” With just two vans and very limited resources, they were somehow able to juggle the schedules of several sports teams. Each van had a name, one of them was Myrtle. They were only 15-passenger vans, so the coach and 14 players would pile in, and that’s how they would travel to games. 

“We had no soccer field. We had nothing. So we would practice and play at Glen Maury Park, which is a campground, so literally on Monday mornings, I would go shovel off the campfire pits from over the weekend so we could play soccer.”

In Dr. Bouchelle’s office, you can see two soccer balls on display, signed by his first team. The left is from the first-ever intercollegiate sports game at SVU when the men’s soccer played at Bridgewater College. They lost 0 to 2. The soccer ball on the right is from the first-ever victory in men’s soccer when they beat Bridgewater College 4 to 3 in the last game of the season.

So many essential tasks had to be done by hand. Bouchelle recalls, “Literally before the first game playing Bridgewater College, I remember being in Robey Hall ironing on numbers on people’s uniforms so we could play soccer.”

In more recent years, Dr. Bouchelle remembers attending a senior banquet, a dinner formerly held for seniors the night before graduation. He just happened to be sitting next to Glade Knight, who led the charge in establishing Southern Virginia University. At the time, Bouchelle worked as dean of students, which can often be a challenging position. Other universities often have to task their Deans with addressing serious concerns such as drug use or sexual assault among the students. But because of the high standards adopted by the students at Southern Virginia University, those kinds of concerns were a rare occurrence. “Here, it’s mostly about helping people be better and living the code of honor and that kind of stuff…[it wasn’t about] fraternities and drinking.” At the banquet, “I just remember I got a little emotional…and said thank you for giving me a place where I can do my job in a nice way. And that’s the way it always was. It’s just a wonderful place to be.

“These early professors’ investments brought an incredible spirit to the school, bringing vitality to the students’ education. “When people ask me about my career, I say my career is SVU. I can’t say I’ve been [just] SVU teaching or SVU administration or SVU registrar—it’s been SVU. That’s my career. Of course, I love the students; that’s the main thing; I just always loved the spirit of this place. It goes back to the first thing that Ross Wall said: there’s a special spirit here. And even though our children are all out west now except for one, we keep telling them that this is home.”

Sanneke Taylor is a young writer and graduate of Southern Virginia University. She loves to explore and write on a wide variety of topics from current events to health to local histories. Follow her on Instagram (@sanneke.taylor.writing) to see more of her work.