Storer College

Storer College, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, operated from 1867 to 1955. A national icon for Blacks, in the town where the end of American slavery began, as Frederick Douglass famously put it, it was a unique institution whose focus changed several times. There is no one category of college in which it fits neatly.
Storer began as a one-room elementary school, sponsored by New England Free Baptists, teaching newly-freed slaves, children and adults, to read. At a conference in 2015 honoring tbe 150th anniversary of Storer College, John Cuthbert, head of the West Virginia & Regional History Center, observed:
A gift from John Storer led to the charter of "a school which might eventually become a College, to be in located in one of the Southern States, at which youth could be educated without distinction ot race or color". Though called a college from the beginning, it was a normal school until into the twentieth century, providing high school-level instruction to future primary school teachers. It also is not "historically black" in the usual sense. The student body was overwhelmingly Black, and in the 1910 advertisement reproduced at right it describes itself as "for Colored students", but there were some white students. It was also ahead of its time in that it accepted both male and female students, which then was unusual.
The Free Baptists called Storer their greatest success. The U.S. Congress turned over to it four buildings that had been used for housing at the former Harpers Ferry National Armory. The school gradually expanded its offerings, adding a traditional or "collegiate" high school, an industrial division, then junior college classes, and finally four-year programs. The College built additional buildings. Until 1891, when the state West Virginia Colored Institute opened, it was the only college in West Virginia that accepted non-white students.
While it existed it had a great symbolic importance to American Blacks. 
The Niagara Movement, predecessor of the NAACP, held its first American meeting there in 1906 (its first meeting was in Canada) and would have met there again in 1907, but the college prohibited it. Attendees walked to John Brown's Fort, which shortly thereafter was moved to the campus. Black tourists came to Harpers Ferry; there was a hotel catering to them, the Hilltop House, built and managed by a Black Storer graduate, Thomas Lovett. In the summer, Storer rented dormitory rooms to tourists and summer boarders, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran excursion trains from Baltimore and Washington.
It is commonly said that Storer closed because state funding ended after the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling found segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. There is a kernel of truth to it, but it was but the last of a long series of financial problems. In the first place, Storer College charged no tuition. Its main funding came from the Freewill Baptists. The state of West Virginia helped off and on, but refused to fully fund Storer, or turn it into a state college, because it was religiously affiliated, and because the Constitution of West Virginia prohibited the joint study of Black and white students in publicly-supported schools. Storer was a New England project, or a Black project, but it was not a West Virginia project. From a West Virginian point of view, Storer's remote location was terrible. The College Trustees chose to retain the religious affiliation and to keep the school open to all. State money then went to fund the new West Virginia Colored Institute (1891) and Bluefield Colored Institute (1895), which were more centrally located and served students that might have attended Storer.
Providing four-year college educations was much more expensive than training primary school teachers. In fact it was beyond the resources of the Freewill Baptists, who support for the college depended on such things as children's Sunday School contributions.
Storer never achieved regional accreditation, and its new (1936) three-year pre-med degrees were not accepted at medical schools. Accreditation required a $100,000 endowment, and Storer had only $20,000. The library and gymnasium were outdated. At the same time, Storer did not have the support of the local communify. The hostility from the white community, most of whom wished Brown had never heard of Harper's Ferry, and some of whom made no secret of what they thought of a "nigger college", led to some management decisions that sapped the College's support internally. The College had to sell land to meet expenses. With no state money coming ever again, or so they expected, there was no way to survive. So it closed in 1955.
The college's former campus and buildings were returned to federal control, specifically to the National Park Service (NPS), authorized in a 1962 appropriation, as part of what was then Harpers Ferry National Monument and is now the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. It is currently (2021) one of NPS's four regional training centers.
History. The Storer campus.
In 1865, as a representative of New England's Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society, charged with coordinating their instructional efforts in the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding areas, Reverend Nathan Cook Brackett chose centrally-located Harpers Ferry as his base. The Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, on low ground adjoining the rail line and the Potomac, was destroyed during the Civil War and was never rebuilt, and the lower town was in poor condition. However, a sturdy and almost vacant building on higher ground was available; it was known as Lockwood House for a Union general who had stayed there briefly. Brackett installed his family.
Under him were four different schools, in different communities. One was conducted by him and his family in Lockwood House, which was to become Storer College's first building. They taught reading, writing, and arithmetic to the children of former slaves and sometimes to their parents. 
From this beginning as a one-room school for freedmen, Storer developed slowly into a normal school, an academic (college prep) school, then a two-year college, and finally a full-fledged, degree-granting four-year college open to all. Former slaves came to Storer as they were eager to learn to read and write, to help them make their way in a new world of free labor. Some wanted to learn new skills and leave the agricultural fields where most had worked.
This school was related to a larger national effort by Northern philanthropic organizations and the government's Freedmen's Bureau to set up schools in order to educate the millions of African Americans freed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. From Harpers Ferry, Reverend Brackett directed the efforts of dedicated missionary teachers, who provided a basic education to thousands of former slaves congregated in the relatively safe haven of the Shenandoah Valley by the end of the American Civil War.
Teaching teachers.
Dedicated as they were, these few teachers could not begin to meet the educational needs of the freedmen in the area. Across the South, education of freedmen was an urgent priority within their communities. By 1867, some 16 teachers struggled to educate 2,500 students in the Shenandoah Valley. Reverend Brackett realized that he needed to train African-American teachers.
In 1867, Reverend Brackett's school came to the notice of John Storer, a philanthropist from Maine, through Rev. Oren B. Cheney, founder of Bates College, a Free Will Baptist school in Maine. Storer offered a $10,000 grant to the Free Will Baptists for "a school which might eventually become a College, to be in located in one of the Southern States, at which youth could be educated without distinction ot race or color", if the Freewill Baptist Church matched his $10,000 donation.
The money was raised, and by March 1868 Storer received its state charter, which was approved in the Legislature by a vote of 13–6, though the phrase "without distinction of race or color" was fiercely debated. At the same time the institution was authorized to operate as a normal school, training teachers for the "colored schools". The Normal School opened its doors in October of that year.
According to its Trustees, in 1870:
Armory buildings and land.
According to a bill signed by President Andrew Johnson on December 15, 1868, the U.S. Government donated to the new Storer College the buildings which became the core of its campus, including the building where Brackett had been teaching his classes. These were four sturdy but vacant buildings built as housing for workers and managers at the Armory, together with land.
The College was dedicated on December 22, 1869.
The "College" of Storer College.
When founded and for most of its existence, Storer did not offer what in the 21th century would be deemed a college education or college credits. Numerous other colleges, such as Tougaloo College, New-York Central College, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and Oberlin College, also offered instruction at a pre-college level. They were running in essence college-preparatory schools; in the 19th century, in many areas there were no schools preparing students for college. Even in the 20th century, most "junior colleges for Negroes" delivered primarily high-school -level instruction.
At the time, credentials as understood today (2021)—college degrees, for example—were much less important, and the line between college and pre-college instruction was often blurry. Just as today with upper undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S., pre-college and college students might be in the same classroom, taking the same course at the same time, but at a different level of instruction. Medical schools, in the nineteenth century, did not require as prerequisite a college education as understood today (2021). Neither did teaching: normal schools to train teachers for public elementary schools offered high school level instruction. "I studied at X College" did not necessarily mean, then, that the person had received a college education. No one saw this as a problem, as a college education was much less important, and somewhat unusual. Having studied at the "prep school" gave some of the intellectual benefits and prestige of studying at the college.
Storer was the first school for Blacks, ex-slaves or freeborn, in the new state of West Virginia, that was more than a one-room, one-teacher, "ungraded" operation (and there weren't many of those either). There was nothing similar, at least nearby, in any neighboring state. While training elementary school teachers in the normal school, there were also lots of illiterate adult students for the student teachers to instruct. Storer College spent much of its early years teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, as almost no one else in the state was providing this instruction to Blacks. Storer's Preparatory Division was preparing students for the Normal School, which required literacy. No one saw this as a problem; it was what the West Virginia Legislature expected when they chartered Storer College, described as "a high school for negroes" by a hostile newspaper. No one else in West Virginia was educating those students until the foundation in 1891 of the West Virginia Colored Institute, today West Virginia State University, and in 1895 of the Bluefield Colored Institute, today Bluefield State College. (They are in 2021 the universities in West Virginia with the lowest Black enrollment.) They certainly were not welcome at the segregated state normal school, Shepherd College, founded in 1871 in nearby Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
In 1938 Storer began offering a curriculum that would lead to a college degree.
Faculty of Storer College.
The Storer College Alumni Association has published on its Web site a list of all the faculty and other employees.
In 1871 the faculty was the following:
Plus various substitutes, assistants, and a matron.
Hamilton Hatter, an African American from Jefferson County, first studied at Storer, then received a bachelor's degree from Bates College in 1888. He then joined the faculty of Storer, which he left in 1896 to become the first principal of Bluefield Colored Institute. He was a trustee of Storer from 1891 until 1906.
In 1899, the President, the first to be given that title, was Henry F. McDonald. At that time there were 7 full-time and 4 part-time teachers, no courses beyond the high school level, an outdated library, inadequate science labs and equipment, and buildings in desperate need of essential repairs.
During the 1911–1912 academic year, Storer had a faculty of 19: 6 male and 13 female, 10 white and 9 "Negro".
In 1931-32, of the 11 faculty members reported, 5 had a master's degree, and 6 a bachelor's degree.
Richard I. McKinney became Storer's first African-American president in 1944, with the goal of making Storer "a noteworthy four-year institution". He was the College's first employee with a Ph.D. (from Yale). Under him, Storer hired additional Black faculty; some white faculty had a problem with this. Tensions became worse because McKinney worked to strengthen the College's ties to Africa, including inviting alumnus Nnamdi Azikiwe, President of Nigeria, as commencement speaker in 1947. Financial solvency was not achieved, and there were tensions with the paternalistic white Board of Directors. McKinney tendered his resignation in 1949, but it was not accepted until the following year, when "the board was...eager to rid Storer of McKinney".
Enrollment at Storer College.
The first 8 graduates of the Storer Normal School graduated in 1872. The first graduates of the Academic Department were in 1880.
In 1871 there were 203 enrollees. Counting those still students, Academic Department, 42 students; Normal Department, 174 students; Preparatory Division, 101 students. As of that date there had been 285 different students enrolled. The same year, the "Spirit of Jefferson" newspaper reported "more than 150...of all ages and sexes, and...all shades and colors." In 1875, there were 285.
A magazine article of 1874 gave fall term enrollment as 80, winter terrm 167, and summer term 124.
In 1881, a report of the Free-Will Baptists indicates that at Storer there were 200 enrolled students, 62 graduates, level unspecified, and the total number who had enrolled at some time was 800. The report also says that the College had "sent out" over 200 teachers and 25 preachers. In 1882–84 there were 63 enrolled in the three-year normal school training.
In its first 20 years, the school trained hundreds of teachers from West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
In 1895 there were 250 graduates of the Normal Department.
In 1901 there were 49 male and 73 female students.
In 1931 there were 130 students, 52 atthe junior college level and 78 at the high school level.
Over its 90-year history, about 7,000 students enrolled. The Storer College Alumni Association has a 70-page list on its web site. As of the latter 19th century students came from 14 states and 4 foreign countries.
Student life.
Students "of any state of advancement", who could "give satisfactory evidence of good moral character", were admitted on any day of the session, and placed by examination. Every student was required to have a Bible and to attend chapel, Sunday school. and 9 AM prayer.
Students at Storer were subject to many other rules. Class attendance was mandatory, as was an hour's study before class each morning. Students were not allowed to drop or change classes. Students could not "loiter" on campus, and they were forbidden from leaving the campus during the week, and on weekends were to avoid dances and "walks in mixed company". Women students were not allowed out after dark, could not be seen alone in the company of a man, and required an escort when going to the train station.
Campus buildings.
With the support of Representative and future President James Garfield, who had studied in a Free Will Baptist school, Congress turned over to the War Department, who turned over to the Freedman's Bureau, and then to Storer, four surviving buildings at Camp Hill. They were "dilapidated" after Civil War damage.
Additional buildings:
Physical plant.
In 1889 the school "very much need[ed] a heating system". The school had no running water, and the town of Harper's Ferry was "too poor" to put in a water works system.They have therefore no protection from fire. The Industrial Building was practically completed, and they were seeking $1,000 to buy equipment for it. A physics and chemistry laboratory was set up in the DeWolf Industrial Building, and they are raising money for a carpentry building.
Lincoln Hall had three stories, and it was set aside for Black summer boarders. The original Lincoln Hall burned in 1909.
The facilities were described as "bare bones". For example, no hot water in the men's dormitory, in 1947.
Storer College, Jefferson County, and West Virginia.
In 1867, that the charter of Storer should say "without distinction of race or color" was "fiercely debated" in the Legislature, and approval of the charter was delayed until March 1868.
In 1881 the Legislature directed that the state finance the education of 17 prospective "colored" teachers, this being the number, relative to West Virginia's population, that corresponds to the ratio of white prospective teachers supported, to the white population.
Finances of the college.
The school did not charge tuition, which most of its students had no immediate way to pay. Rooms were also free to students, so their only expense was for their board.
By 1881, the school had already passed through "severe financial embarrassments".
Support of the College was the largest single endeavor of the Free Baptists, to which they were "thoroughly committed".
In 1867, in addition to chartering it, the West Virginia Legislature appropriated $10,000 (). This was the first appropriation in the state for the education of Negroes above the elemntary level.
From 1882 to 1892, Storer received $630 from the State of West Virginia, to provide "industrial-type training for Negroes". In 1903, President McDonald referred to the state's "small biennial appropriation" for the same purpose.
In 1911–1912, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which "as a result of doctrinal conflicts" absorbed the Free Baptists in 1911, contributed $1,350 to salaries, and in 1912–1913 was budgeted to contribute $2,750, and for 1913–1914 and 1914–1915, $3,000 each year. In addition, Storer was to receive $1,785 from the sale of Manning Bible School (Cairo, Illinois) property, 
In 1926, the Legislature appropriated $6,000, which did not even cover half the faculty and administrative salaries. The Free Will Baptist–Home Mission Society, which quashed a fundraising drive, saying they were overextended, contributed $3,000. The Women's Baptist Home Mission Society contributed $3,000, to be used on programs that served women. In 1925 the income from these three main sources totaled $12,096, while expenditures totalled $49,291. "Boarding fees, tuition, and income from the school's farming enterprises, property investments, and donations made up the remainder."
In 1932, the West Virginia Legislature reduced its support from $17,500 to $12,000.
Local hostility.
Raising $10,000 turned out to be easy compared to facing local resistance by whites to a "colored school." The Freewill Baptists' other mission school, resembling that in Harpers Ferry, in Beaufort, North Carolina, was abandoned after one year due to "lingering Confederate sympathizers". Storer's predecessor in Jefferson County, a school staffed by "Miss Mann", a niece of the educator Horace Mann, in neighboring Bolivar, only lasted one year because of "militant race prejudice". The town of Harpers Ferry had already rejected a proposal to use [Lockwood House] "for a school for colored children". Storer's charter aroused intense and violent opposition, and passed by one vote. 
Residents of Harpers Ferry tried everything from slander and vandalism to pulling political strings in their efforts to shut down the school. They petitioned the Legislature to have Storer's charter revoked. One teacher wrote, "it is unusual for me to go to the Post Office without being hooted at, and twice I have been stoned on the streets at noonday." Threats by the Ku Klux Klan in the first years caused the faculty and students to carry arms while walking outside. At one point lady teachers required a military escort.
These efforts did not succeed in closing Storer, and eventually, local attitudes changed. In 1891, "the inhabitants of Harper's Ferry hold a true interest and even a pride in the college. Some of its old opponents are now numbered among its most devoted friends. And no person in the community is held in higher honor or greater esteem than Mr. Brackett, once of all men the most hated and despised." However, in 1896 the college ceased renting rooms in the summer to Black vacationers, because of local opposition. It continued accommodating white vacationers. The decision was much criticized by alumni.
The citizens of Harpers Ferry did not like having John Brown's Fort in their town or the Black tourists it attracted, and were happy it was moved to Chicago. They were quite unhappy at its return and then move to the Storer campus.
In 1944 Storer's first black president, Richard Ishmael McKinney, was welcomed with a burning cross on his lawn.
Benevolent paternalism.
Some modern scholars view Storer as a reconstructed plantation. Students were taught that they should efface themselves. The school had at one point a Modern Minstrel Company, which performed "Plantation Songs and Melodies” and renditions of numbers like “If the Man in the Moon Was a Coon". President Nathan Brackett said that the school’s “humble and illiterate” students "generally show a desire to work and submit to wholesome discipline.” To instill moral character, students were obliged to “march in military columns” between classes, were not permitted to “jump, dance, or scuffle” inside campus buildlngs or go on “pleasure excursions, rides, or walks in mixed company.” Other rules deterred students from socializing in town or mingling with townspeople.
Students did most campus labor, cooking meals, cleaning buildings, maintaining the campus, and caring for the animals in the school farm.
Education at Storer.
Understanding that former slaves needed to learn more than the three Rs to function in society, Storer founders intended to provide more than a basic education. According to the first college catalog, students were to "receive counsel and sympathy, learn what constitutes correct living, and become qualified for the performance of the great work of life." In its early years, in the press to expand literacy among the freedmen and their children, Storer taught freedmen to read, write, spell, do sums, and to go back into their communities to teach others these lessons.
Storer remained primarily a teachers college, but added courses in higher education as well as industrial training. Students graduated with a "normal degree," for teaching elementary school students, or an academic degree, for those going on to college. Buildings were constructed through the 1930s, with Permelia Eastman Cook Hall, a handsome grey stone building, completed 1939-1940.
In 1911, the West Virginia Legislature struck Storer from its list of accredited normal programs, meaning its graduates could not receive teaching certificates, because "the curriculum did not adequately include enough professional training."
In 1921 Storer is granted junior collegiate status, althout it did not award Associate degrees until 1937, and in 1945, senior status. The state accredited its education programs.
Industrial education.
Starting in the 1880s, Storer started offering vocational and industrial courses; in 1897 the trustees made industrial education a course of study; there were 137 students that year. This formalization of manual labor at Storer corresponded with a widespread movement in the South that was predicated upon white supremacists['] notions of black inferiority. ...Manual labor made African Americans fit for citizenship by instilling Christian values and moral character." The school eventually required all normal students to take industrial courses, so that by 1904 it was training more tradespeople than teachers.
Henry T. McDonald, also white, in 1899 became Storer's second president. He strongly advocated manual-labor education, overseeing major aspects of the school’s transition.
Storer graduates.
In 1895, the 20 "free schools" in Jefferson County were all taught by Storer graduates. Storer graduates were also found "in other important schools all over the state", and from Maryland in the northeast to Texas in the southwest.
Events at Storer.
Frederick Douglass' speech, 1881.
Storer College was a site of various important events in West Virginia and national African-American history. In 1881, the noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery as a young man in the antebellum years and become a noted orator, and whose was on Storer's Board of Trustees, delivered his famous speech on abolitionist John Brown at Storer College. His intent was to raise funds for an endowed John Brown professorship, to be held by a black man. (It never materialized.) There was a "large gathering of people" from Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and some from as far as New England. They attended a ceremonial laying of the cornerstone for Anthony Hall.
Free Baptists General Conferences, 1882, 1889, and 1901.
The Free Baptists, who had founded Storer College, held their 1882, 1889, and 1901 triennial General Conferences at the College. Attendance at the 1889 meeting, including locals, was 500. In 1901 the business sessions were held in the chapel of Andrews Hall, the evening sessions in the Haptist Church.
Niagara Movement conference, 1906.
In August 1906, Storer Normal School hosted (against the wishes of its white administrators) the second conference of the Niagara Movement and the first on American soil. Formed by a group of leading African-American intellectuals, the Niagara Movement planned a campaign to eliminate discrimination based on race. The movement's leader, W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist with a PhD, rejected the prevalent theory of "accommodation" promoted by Booker T. Washington, President of the Tuskegee Institute. Washington advocated conciliation and advancement of the "race" rather than confrontation as a means of gaining social equality. He encouraged the teaching of rural and industrial skills at his campus to prepare students for the rural worlds most would return to.
The Niagara Movement published an annual "Address to the World", demanding voting rights (the mass of African Americans in the South had been essentially disenfranchised by the turn of the century), educational and economic opportunities, justice in the courts, and recognition in unions and the military. Many conservative African-American and white leaders became alienated by their approach, which eroded potential political support. During the 1906 conference, Storer staff expressed discomfort with the group's militancy, and dismay at their tendency to consider even progressive whites as the enemy.
By 1910, five years after it was formed, the Niagara Movement was dissolved. While it did not produce material gains in the civil rights arena, its leaders had announced their intention to pursue full civil rights, thereby laying a valuable foundation for the development of a more broad-based push for equality.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in New York City in 1910 with an interracial board, and many of the members of the failing Niagara Movement quickly joined it. The NAACP had many of the same goals of the Niagara Movement; it also pursued a concentrated program of litigation campaigns in the effort to overturn of barriers to voter registration and voting, end state and local jurisdictions' segregation of housing, gain integrated public transportation and other facilities, seek integrated public education, achieve fair jury trials for blacks, and similar goals.
John Brown's Fort, 1909.
John Brown's Fort, the firehouse at the former Harpers Ferry Armory, was moved to the Storer campus in 1909. It "was a tourist destination—almost a shrine—for African Americans in the late nineteenth century." In 1968, after closure of the college and establishment of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, the National Park Service moved it back to as close to its original location as possible.
Storer College.
In 1938, under the leadership of school president Henry T. McDonald, Storer became a four-year college. The last new building was completed in 1939-1940. Enrollment peaked at around 400, as Storer and other colleges had struggled during the privations of the Great Depression. The number of students dipped lower with the high rate of participation by young men in World War II. The college had received some financial support from the state of West Virginia, as it helped educate blacks, who were limited to segregated schools and colleges.
Although the school granted four-year degrees, it never received regional accreditation; it never applied. As a result, it was forced to turn away some students. Those who wanted to be doctors, for example, were not admitted. The college was unable to fund the laboratories and other scientific equipment necessary for a pre-med degree.
Closure of the College.
In 1954, the NAACP achieved a victory with the US Supreme Court decision in the "Brown v. Board of Education" case, which declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. "The West Virginia Legislature withdrew its annual appropriation from Storer because of the Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in public schools, and the resultant policy of integration in state schools. The Legislature [described as "unsympathetic"] said the appropriation was intended to finance studies by Negro students at Storer but is now unnecessary because Negroes now are eligible to enroll at other state colleges. The enrollment at Storer has been exclusively Negro." The state appropriation was $20,000. In its final year, the College had 88 students.
Storer had been accumulating debt for a decade, and could not survive without the state appropriation. In June 1955, Storer College closed its doors forever. (West Virginia has continued to support Bluefield State College and West Virginia State University, larger historically black colleges that achieved regional accreditation and could offer more types of classes.)
Legacy.
In 1962, Congress appropriated funds for the National Park Service to acquire the surviving buildings on campus, some occupied by squatters, as part of what is now known as Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. It had been established in 1944 as a National Monument, taking in much of the declining town.
As part of this change, in 1964, the movable physical assets of the college were transferred to the historically white Alderson-Broaddus College, a Baptist college, and used to establish scholarships for black students. The college's endowment was transferred to Virginia Union University, a historically Black college.
Since 1964, Virginia Union University has considered, and treats, graduates of the college as alumni of VUU. VUU's L. Douglas Wilder Library and Learning Resource Center holds Storer College's former library collection and some of the college's records. Other Storer College records are held at the library of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, West Virginia University's West Virginia and Regional History Center, and at Howard University's Moorland–Spingarn Research Center.
The campus of the college is now maintained as a part of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Since 1963, the three remaining college structures now house the National Park Service's Stephen T. Mather Training Center and the Service's library. The Training Center is one of four major training centers operated by and for the National Park Service. It is named for the Service's first Director, Stephen Mather. The college buildings were completely remodeled. 
Each August, the alumni of Storer College gather in Harpers Ferry for an annual reunion. At last count fewer than 70 alumni survive.
Archival material.
The archives of Storer College are located at the WVU Libraries, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia. "The West Virginia and Regional History Center holds five archives and manuscripts collections that exclusively contain Storer College materials." Howard University has a small collection of Storer material.