ECTTS Timeline

Having retired from an unparalleled career in political office, Governor Jarvis spent his final decades in his adopted home, Greenville, playing a leading role in transforming the small but thriving tobacco town on the Tar River into a center of educational distinction. Working with state senator James L. Fleming, a Greenville resident, Governor Jarvis contributed his priceless political connections throughout the state to have legislation enacted providing for the school, and then subsequently for it to be located in Greenville. Governor Jarvis also played the leading role in selecting the architectural style of the campus, Spanish colonial, reflecting his service to the nation as minister to Brazil. Jarvis also presided over the selection of the first president of the training school, Robert Herring Wright (1870-1934), and the original faculty. When the school opened in the fall of 1909 to a class of 123 students (104 women, 19 men), there was no doubt that the eastern part of the state had entered a new and profoundly promising age.Unlike other schools in the area that were founded and then folded, East Carolina succeeded with distinction. Led for over two decades by President Robert Wright, a native North Carolinian devoted to excellence and progressive approaches to education, the training school rapidly filled a variety of needs with year round instruction of both aspiring and in-service teachers. The result was a degree of cultural and educational enlightenment in eastern North Carolina that continues even as the school advances into its second century.

Belief in the progressive power of education vis-à-vis the problems challenging humanity was an integral ethic at the institution. Confident elation over the new experiment was evident in virtually all that the school and its students did, from hosting a lecture by Helen Keller, to staging dramatic performances of plays like The Mikado, to the founding of literary societies, gardening, chapel talks, hiking, social activities, and myriad other forms of community engagement complementing classroom learning.

View First floor plans of the Austin Building