I spent several years working as an assistant archivist at Judson College in Marion, Alabama. I catalogued letters, organized photograph collections, identified documents that needed conservation treatment, and learned — in the hands-on, unhurried way that archival work demands — what it means to be the custodian of someone else's memory.
When Judson College suspended its academic operations on July 31, 2021, after 183 years of continuous operation, I was not surprised. The college's financial struggles had been widely discussed, and the COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated a crisis that had been building for years. But knowing something is coming does not make the loss less real when it arrives. I thought, immediately, about the archive.
Judson College: A Brief History
Judson College was founded in 1838 by the Alabama Baptist Convention as the Female Institute of Marion. It was one of the earliest institutions of higher education for women in Alabama and one of the oldest continuously operating women's colleges in the United States at the time of its closure. Over 183 years, it educated thousands of women from across Alabama and the wider South, contributing alumnae who became teachers, missionaries, artists, community leaders, and scholars.
Marion itself — the seat of Perry County, located in the heart of the Black Belt — is a place of extraordinary historical significance. It was the birthplace of Coretta Scott King. It was the site, in 1965, of a civil rights demonstration in which state troopers shot and killed Jimmie Lee Jackson, an event that directly precipitated the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. It has been, for much of its history, a predominantly Black community with a rich cultural and political tradition that coexists — not always comfortably — with the legacy of the antebellum planter society that originally dominated the region.
Historical photograph: Judson College campus, Marion, Alabama. Ideally showing Lovelace Hall (built 1854) or the Chapel (built 1857), the two antebellum structures used as Breckenridge Military Hospital during the Civil War. Source: Samford University Special Collections.
What the Archive Contained
The Judson College archive was not a large institutional archive by the standards of major research universities. But like many small college archives, it contained materials of disproportionate historical value — because Judson had been operating since 1838, and because it sat at the center of a community with a rich and largely underdocumented history.
The collection included the college's administrative records stretching back to the antebellum period: board minutes, correspondence between presidents and the Alabama Baptist Convention, enrollment ledgers, financial accounts. These records document not only the institution's internal history but also its relationship to the broader social and economic history of Perry County and the Alabama Black Belt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It also included alumnae files and correspondence — thousands of letters from women who had studied at Judson across the college's long history, writing to report on their lives, their families, their work. For historians of women's education and women's experience in the American South, these files represent a primary source of enormous value.
And it included the college's photograph collection: images of campus life, of commencement ceremonies, of faculty and students across more than a century of change. Many of these photographs have never been published or studied.
Digitized archival photograph: Judson College students or faculty, circa 1890–1920. Shows the institutional photographic record. Source: Samford University Special Collections (transferred 2022).
The Transfer to Samford University
When Judson College's board of trustees voted in May 2021 to close the institution and file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, one urgent question was what would become of the archives. The resolution, reached in 2022, was a transfer of the historical collections to Samford University in Birmingham — an Alabama Baptist institution with the staff, space, and mission compatible with long-term stewardship of Judson's records.
Samford's Special Collections department undertook the responsibility of organizing, processing, and making accessible the transferred materials. The collection includes records, catalogs, yearbooks, scrapbooks, and photographs. It is now available, at least in part, to researchers visiting Samford's library.
This is, by any measure, a better outcome than many institutional closures produce. Small college archives frequently scatter when institutions close: sold at estate sales, distributed among administrators, donated to local libraries without adequate staffing to process them, or simply discarded. The Judson transfer represents a reasonably orderly resolution of a genuine preservation emergency.
What the Transfer Did Not Solve
But the transfer to Samford, while preserving the physical materials, did not resolve several deeper problems. First, the collection remains largely unprocessed — which means that researchers seeking specific materials face significant barriers. An unprocessed archive is better than a lost one, but it is not, for practical purposes, an accessible one.
Second, the transfer to Birmingham creates a geographic disconnect. Marion and Perry County are more than a hundred miles from Birmingham. Community members, local researchers, and regional historians who might most directly benefit from access to the college's records now face a substantial journey to consult them.
Third, and most significantly from a preservation standpoint, the closure of Judson left unresolved questions about the physical structures of the campus. Two buildings on the Judson campus — Lovelace Hall, built in 1854, and the Chapel, built in 1857 — are among the oldest surviving antebellum educational structures in Alabama. Both were used during the Civil War as the Breckenridge Military Hospital. Both are, as of this writing, in uncertain condition and uncertain ownership as the bankruptcy proceedings continue to work through the courts.
Current-condition photograph: Lovelace Hall or the Chapel (1854/1857), Judson College campus, Marion, Alabama. Show current state of preservation/deterioration. Document architectural features — columns, masonry, fenestration — that make these buildings significant.
Marion as a Case Study
The story of Judson's archive is, in miniature, the story of small-town institutional heritage across the rural South. When anchor institutions close — colleges, hospitals, churches, manufacturing plants — they take with them not only their direct services but the documentary record of entire communities. The records of Perry County's African American residents, many of whom worked for, affiliated with, or were documented in the records of Judson and its associated institutions, are partially captured in that archive. Their stories now depend on a Birmingham university's willingness and capacity to process and provide access to materials that came to it by circumstance rather than by design.
That is not a criticism of Samford — it is a structural observation about what happens to community history when community institutions fail. The preservation of local archives requires local capacity. And local capacity requires investment, attention, and the sustained will of people who care enough about the past to do the slow, difficult, often invisible work of keeping its record intact.
That work is what SHPS was founded to support. Marion, and places like it across the Black Belt and the wider rural South, deserve the kind of sustained archival attention that we more readily give to famous historical sites and well-endowed institutions. The stories are there. The documents are there, or some of them still are. We must act before more are lost.