Student Entrepreneurs

Davidson College is launching an “Entrepreneurship Initiative” this fall but student entrepreneurs are nothing new at Davidson.

In her history of Davidson College, Cornelia Shaw noted that in the earliest years of the college:

Students who had learned a trade at home were allowed to work in the hours required for manual labor. They could sell the product and apply the money thus earned to tuition bills, in lieu of the reductions mentioned. There were blacksmith shops, cabinet shops, and carpenter shops. William Allison, 1840, had a private harness shop between the Eumenean Hall and the southwest corner of the campus. His father was a tanner and he did a considerable business.

Beginning in the 1850s, some students created management positions for themselves by heading up eating clubs at local boarding houses. This tradition lasted for decades. In 1927, two students placed an  advertisement for an eating club that used the local hotel as a boardinghouse.  The managers got a cut of the monthly fee for gathering new members and gathering their money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other students managed laundry groups. Before our famous laundry service started in 1919, students used local women, or as in the case of the ad below, traveled to Charlotte carrying bundles of clothes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Faw and Wilfred Shaw took up management of another kind, they started a movie business, showing films to students in 1915.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the mid-1920s to 1955, the college book store, known as the Student’s Store, was managed by students through the Student Government Association.

Students also created temporary businesses providing sandwich deliveries and serving as agents for clothing stores, allowing shopping in Chambers.

All this activity while students did translate into careers.  Davidson has a reputation for producing many ministers and doctors, but by the 1860s, business began to outrank ministry and medicine as alumni professions.  A chart prepared by college registrar Fred Hengeveld provides an overview from 1840 to 1924.