Allegheny College to Celebrate Founders Day on April 26

Ravine and Rustic Bridge, c. 1930 — Photo of the Ravine and Rustic Bridge, with Bentley Hall in the background, from c. 1930. Photo by Kurt Glaubach.

Program to Feature Presentation About the College’s Distinctive Ravine

MEADVILLE, Pa. – April 19, 2010 – The Allegheny College community will celebrate Founders Day at 12:15 p.m. on Monday, April 26, in the Campus Center lobby. The festivities, which will include refreshments and drawings for prizes, are free and open to the public.

The program will include a presentation by Professor Emeritus of History and College Historian Jonathan Helmreich, who will talk about one of the college’s most distinctive landmarks, the Ravine.

Site of the Rustic Bridge, which is linked to some of the college’s oldest and most colorful traditions, the Ravine has an interesting history of its own. Once the location of the college’s first privy, it is now a picturesque landscape with lush plantings of rhododendrons, a few of which have survived from 1910, when Frank Arter, Allegheny class of 1864, donated a boxcar full of native rhododendrons for the Ravine.

A recent photo of the Ravine and Rustic Bridge, taken from the north side, by Bill Owen.

Allegheny alumna Anne Stewart, of the Crawford County Historical Society, and Melissa Mencotti, director of gift planning at the college, will give a short presentation on a project by the college’s Torchbearers, alumni who graduated from Allegheny 50 or more years ago. Torchbearer volunteers are researching and writing about illustrious Allegheny alumni from the 19th and early 20th centuries, research that will be useful as Allegheny prepares for its bicentennial in 2015.

Founders Day was first commemorated in 1909 as a way of acknowledging the work and sacrifice of the Reverend Timothy Alden, who founded the college with the help of the townspeople of Meadville in 1815. Alden and his family first arrived in Meadville in April.

Jonathan Helmreich is the author of “Through All the Years: A History of Allegheny College,” which was published in 2005. In his most recent book, “To Petersburg with the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Letters of Levi Bird Duff, 105th Pennsylvania Volunteers,” he has published the letters of Allegheny graduate and Civil War soldier Levi Bird Duff to Harriet Nixon.