Little Campuses

Small towns, small colleges, and the question of what happened to the scale of things

Take a look at this Google Maps image:

This is the very small town of Lawrenceville, Virginia, near the North Carolina border, home at its peak in the 1950s to about 2,200 people, and now home to just over 1,000.

Do you see that empty area to the left of town in the image? That is the former Saint Paul’s College, an Episcopal-aligned historically black co…