That very day the Millar family moved to Conway. By then Alex had persuaded his parents to sell the farm and join his household. The Millars shipped their furniture and household goods and rode the train down. They reached Conway that afternoon, eager to begin a new life. The day, recalled William John Millar, was “very hot.”
The next day they started unpacking, storing some of their things in barns until their small frame house was ready. Lizzie boiled coffee on a little hand stove and set about making a home. She was three months pregnant.
| What Alex didn't know about running a college would have filled a volume, so he set out to research and write a book about higher education. |
Less than two weeks after the move, both Alex and George took sick, vomiting and “purging.” George recovered fairly soon, but Alex did not. A week later he was still running a temperature of 104. While workmen were laying the first course of bricks on Tabor Hall, Lizzie also fell ill, and then her father-in-law William. Alex was so sick he didn’t put on his pants for 24 days. It was August before they all recovered, and even then Alex had a relapse.
The cornerstone for the new college was laid on Oct. 4, a ceremony attended by about 400. A few days later William received the final payment for his farm stock in Brookfield, pulling up the Millar family’s roots in Missouri and planting them firmly in Conway. They bought some pigs and corn; wallpapered the new kitchen; ordered blinds, a gas stove, and a stove pipe; painted, and varnished. Alex’s brother Charlie rode in on a freight train to check out the new family estate, and when he left, William confided to his diary, “how I miss him!”
By December of that first year it was clear that Hendrix, like Neosho, was teetering on the brink of insolvency. And for most of the 1890s, the wolf stayed at the door. In 1894 three professors resigned from the college, including Alex’s old friends from Neosho. Two of them sued to recover their salaries, but Alex went unpaid. The college defaulted on at least one loan. At one point Alex resurrected his lecture on slang, wrote a new one called “Our Political Inheritance,” and used them to raise funds for the library. He spent much of his time on the road.
William planted a large garden to feed the family and watched happily as the new college building rose above head height. He made screens for the doors and windows, helped Alex set up the library, and built a fenced pig lot. Ellen inherited some money from her aunt and used it to keep the family and the college afloat.
Lizzie and her mother pooled their savings to buy Alex a “spring chair”—a well-designed office chair to save his back. I like to think of him sitting in it, bending over a desk piled high with bookkeeping, correspondence, student papers and plans for the future. There were never enough hours in the day as he raced from task to task, studying up on all those subjects just one step ahead of his students. What Alex didn‘t know about running a college would have filled a volume, so he set out to research and write a book about higher education. He planned a long trip up the East Coast to look at what the best colleges were doing—schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Haverford. Never mind that their students came from old money and fancy preparatory courses, while his tended to be farm boys who needed remedial work. Alex was determined to make Hendrix College the Swarthmore of the South.
The first hard winter