Elon, NC

Elon College is a town that changed its name and kept its trees. Founded around the university established here in 1889, the North Carolina town was called Elon College until 2005, when it became simply Elon — the form under which its records are canonicalised in the archive (a note for the registry); the entry keeps the source heading of the touring years. The name itself is the point: "Elon" is Hebrew for oak, chosen because the campus was laid out in an oak grove, and the university has made the tree its liturgy — every new student receives an acorn at induction, and every graduate a young oak sapling to plant, a life measured from seed to shade.

Elon University grew from a small church college into one of the American South's most admired universities, its campus of brick colonnades, fountains and old oaks regularly ranked among the loveliest in the country. Its cultural calendar is correspondingly serious: the performing-arts programme and visiting series play in the Fine Arts Theater documented in this archive, alongside a year-round schedule of music, theatre and lectures that serves the whole Alamance County region. The town around the gates remains what it was built to be — a leafy academic village where the university's bell tower keeps everyone's time.