Hood College, a private college in Frederick, Maryland, spreads out in front of you. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine this place in 1893, founded as the Woman’s College of Frederick by the Potomac Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States. Its first president, Dr. Joseph Henry Apple, an educator from Pittsburgh only 28 years old at his appointment, welcomed eighty-three women taught by eight faculty in Winchester Hall on East Church Street.
They studied liberal arts and music alongside secretarial trades, and by 1898 the first class had graduated. The college stayed true to its origins as an all-female institution until 1971, then began admitting men as commuters — a pattern that continued until 2003, when men were finally offered residential status. Walk this campus and you are also walking a community that by fall 2018 enrolled 2,052 students: 1,092 undergraduates and 960 graduate students, with thirty-eight percent of them from under-represented racial or ethnic populations or from foreign countries.
Feel the layers of classrooms, music rooms, and shared student life beneath your feet, reaching toward East Church Street and the buildings that hold those early stories.