Construction of the Main Building of Winthrop College, also known as Tillman Hall, 1894. The Winthrop Training School was first opened in 1886 in a renovated stable and former chapel of the Columbia Theological Seminary on the grounds of what is now the Robert Mills House in Columbia. David Bancroft Johnson, superintendent of the Columbia city school system, had appealed to Robert C. Winthrop of the Peabody Board of Directors in Boston for funds to begin a teacher training college for women, to help remedy the shortage of teachers in the South. The $1,500 from that gift gave the new school a name. By 1891, the new institution had outgrown its second home on Marion Street; the South Carolina legislature established it as a normal and industrial college for women, and its trustees in 1893 voted to build a new campus in Rock Hill. Tillman Hall became the focal point of a growing campus that by 1928 was one of the largest women's colleges in the country. D.B. Johnson served as its President until his death in 1928.
Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
