The Little College That Could...But Somehow, Didn't: Henry Lipes' Failed Venture
Part 3 in a series on schooling and my ancestors
Henry Harrison Lipes (1840-1928) was part of a movement in a post-Civil War America that was changing at a dizzying speed. His dream was training the young for a career in business, with himself as college president and proprietor. With an old friend and his father’s money, he bought into a commercial college franchise, Bryant & Stratton, and founded the Bryant, Stratton, Lipes & Diefendorf Commercial College. The Fort Wayne Gazette, even after receiving its advertising money, said, “what a horribly long name.” It soon became known as the Fort Wayne Commercial College.
The Bryant & Stratton chain of business schools were founded by two men who graduated in the 1840s from an early proprietary business school - a for-profit school - in Cleveland. The two created their chain of about fifty franchises, with dreams of having a college in every city with a population of 10,000 or more in the country. There was a huge, emerging white-collar world of industrial capitalism. How to prepare all those young men – and a few women?
Bryant & Stratton implemented a system with strict guidelines for consistency. The same textbooks were used in all schools. In the 1860s they focused on subjects with nineteenth century value: penmanship, business writing - such as letters - business math - such as percentages; bookkeeping and telegraphy. Tuition was $40 for an entire program of study and most programs took three to four months to complete. Students could transfer to any B & S school in any city, and could take free refresher courses once they graduated. Courses were designed for working people, with most taught at night.
The proprietary business college was meeting a practical need that colleges did not meet at all at the time. The state universities, plus the Amhersts and Yales and Harvards were designed for those going into the ministry, a professorship, or to be a doctor or lawyer. They weren’t even necessary to become a lawyer, and not all denominations required college educations for their ministers. The curriculum was unchanging with the classics, Latin and Greek. As one historian said, they focused on what we knew. The idea of a research university had not dawned. Poly-technical schools teaching practical things like engineering were few and far between.
Henry and his friend A.B.C. Diefendorf founded their school in August 1865, opening to students in October. The Civil War just ended in April. Henry must have had education beyond the subscription school of early childhood, and maybe he had business experience, too. He'd sat out the Civil War.
Born in Virginia, his family moved to Fort Wayne when he was seven. His father was a successful farmer and in the 1860s was president of the Allen County Board of Commissioners. Henry's partner, A. Benson C. Diefendorf was from Fort Plain, New York, the son of a Methodist clergyman who also operated a seminary. (The term was interchangeable with ‘academy’ and did not have the religious connotations it does today.) How Benson came to Fort Wayne or how the two met is unknown.
Their first ads ran in October, with a picture of the Burgess Building on the corner of Main and Court Streets. One could learn bookkeeping, penmanship, commercial law, commercial ethics, business correspondence and telegraphing.
Marriage and Fatherhood
In early November Henry slipped away to travel to Boston where he married Sylvia Sophia Barbour, my great-great-grandfather’s sister. Sylvia was an unusually educated woman for her time. She attended a female seminary in Ohio, and was studying at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Why didn't they wait until her return to Fort Wayne, when family and friends could have witnessed the wedding?
Sylvia must have gotten pregnant immediately. July 22, 1866 their first child was born, Clara Jane Lipes. It was now more urgent than ever that Henry made a success of his commercial college.
Promotions
By December, the college gained free publicity by sponsoring a fundraiser to help pay for a monument to Mrs. Eliza George. “Mother George” became beloved, serving as a nurse in the Civil War, following regiments of Hoosier soldiers. She died of typhoid in an army camp in Wilmington, North Carolina a month after Lee’s surrender and a day before she'd been scheduled to return home. The Indiana Sanitary Commission spearheaded a campaign to erect a monument on her grave at Lindenwood Cemetery in Fort Wayne, but they were still short of money.
Eliza George, Fort Wayne's Civil War heroine
The Literary Society at the commercial college planned an “entertainment” with declamations and tableaux. These were two popular forms of nineteenth century entertainment. Their performances covered “A Drama of American History,” from discovery to the present, including a scene in Congress prior to secession and a speech by Jefferson Davis. The entertainment was held over two nights in Hamilton Hall, the main venue in town. The paper did not report on the amount of money raised.
In February 1866, Lipes & Diffendorf dissolved their partnership with the national chain. Bryant and Stratton began holding national conventions of their operators, with the goal of exerting monopoly control over the growing commercial college market. One convention was in Chicago in 1865 and one in Cleveland in 1866. Ironically, bringing their school operators together backfired on the two men. The franchisees were handed an opportunity to visit with each other – and they shared their unhappiness with the terms of their contracts and the frustrations they felt. This led to the formation of their own organization, the National Union of Business Colleges. In May, Henry and Benson announced that Benson was president of the Fort Wayne National Business College.
They were good at getting items printed in the newspaper which were ad content…but seemed more like a news story. In March a “Token of Respect” appeared, signed by 29 students who were the first graduating class of the college. The students included three relatives – Henry’s brother Charles, and Henry’s brother-in-law (my second great-grandfather) Myron C. Barbour, and Myron’s cousin James O. Bird. “The school is conducted by Messrs. Lipes and Diefendorf, whose gentlemanly appearance, smiling faces, and encouraging words will not only win the affection of the student, but all who visit the school and form their acquaintance,” the piece said. At least two of the men's families would mention this graduation in their obituaries in the early 1900s. It meant something.
In April Miss S.J. Fisher, graduate and former manager of the Milwaukee Telegraph Institute, arrived and took over responsibilities as teacher and manager of the telegraphy department at the school. It was noted that she was an “exemplary Christian,” something important for a single woman working in the male business world. Her arrival of course made the news and a free plug for the college.
Another promotion was offering free penmanship lessons from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. - a time when most young men were out working.
What wasn’t mentioned were financial struggles. Those would come painfully to light later. Proprietary colleges could be lucrative, but of course if they failed to attract enough students month after month, they couldn’t operate for long in the red.
In May 1866 Lipes and Diefendorf split. The newspaper announced the dissolution of their partnership. Henry, the newspaper item noted, “will remain in connection with the Institute (the school now officially being the Fort Wayne Union Business and Telegraph Institute) as a teacher of penmanship….He is one of the most accomplished penmen in the city…”
A separate article said that Diefendorf was now sole proprietor of the Fort Wayne National Business College and a member of the National Business College Association. The association urged him to open a college in Buffalo, the article said, and large inducements were offered, but he was committed to Fort Wayne and building up the largest attendance of any business college in the city. This made him, of course, a direct competitor with Henry.
In October Henry won first-place awards at the Wabash County Fair for penmanship, pen drawing and card writing. This came with a cash prize and bragging rights, plus a little publicity for his college. There was otherwise a dearth of items about either business college - if Diefendorf was still operating his - for the rest of 1866. As late as 1873 A.B.C. Diefendorf was mentioned in the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette as a good poll worker for Democrats and a "quiet, gentlemanly man," but at some point he returned to his parents’ home in Fort Plains, New York. He resumed teaching penmanship in his father’s private seminary. He remained “Professor” Diefendorf, a teacher all his life, and died in 1902.
Meanwhile, Henry soldiered on. In May 1867 he hired a teacher, J.B. McKean, of Ohio, another “fine penman.” He revamped his school room, taking down a partition that separated him from students. The room could accommodate 100 to 200 students, the business notice said – probably desperately wishful thinking. He continued to try incentives to bring students in. He offered a discount for groups of five students signing up for a class together (penmanship was $10). He continuously offered a premium - the word used for prize - for most improved in penmanship after the 23-class course. In October he offered a silver card case said to be worth $15 to the lady with the most improvement and a silver watch chain valued at the same for a gentleman. They could be seen at Beuret’s Jewelry Store on Main Street.
View of a Bryant & Stratton classroom, probably very similar to Henry's college
Then the price of the penmanship course dropped to only $5. He began offering classes every night. In September 1868 he wrote a letter to the editor. “It is now being reported throughout the city that I intend giving up the Commercial College at this point, and locate in Toledo, Ohio,” he began. He denied this, saying, “I have labored too hard for the past three years to establish a college, to give it up now.” He was opening a business college in Toledo, and he did move to Toledo. But he intended to teach in and supervise both, he said, and tried to make it sound like an advantage that students in Fort Wayne could take classes in Toledo if they wanted to. He must have received some criticism - who doesn’t - as he said, “To such young men as say they have attended this college eight or ten months and never learned anything, and for that reason denounce the college as a humbug; I have only to say that unless some patent right[s] man invents a machine for the manufacture of brains their cases are utterly hopeless.” There was undoubtedly some bitterness and frustration in that remark.
Why Toledo? Maybe it seemed tempting to get away from the criticism and frustrations of one’s hometown. Probably Toledo didn't already have a competing business college, and it had a population of 30,000. Lipes Business College and Writing Institute opened at the corner of Summit and Madison in Toledo, as announced 30 Oct 1868. It emphasized - as commercial colleges did - their practical nature. Men came out of four year colleges clueless, with no idea how to begin in business, went the thinking of the day. But a practical business school education - that was the ticket. Henry claimed that fifty students flocked to the school as soon as it opened. “Nothing will elevate a young man to high and prominent position as will a thorough knowledge of Mathematics, Bookkeeping and Penmanship,” he promised. “Young men who have a thorough knowledge of these three branches is fully [sic] prepared to launch out in the busy world and earn an honest and respectable livelihood for himself.”
Then came a devastating headline in the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 4 Jan 1869. “Is It a Swindle?” Followed by:
The students of Lipes’ Commercial College were very much astonished to hear that the college was closed. It seems they were dismissed Thursday night, with the understanding that they would assemble again this morning; but during Friday and Saturday, Mr. Lipes, who had come down to the city, removed all his property and departed, leaving word that the College was closed. The students, many of them poor country lads, had been required to pay their tuition in advance and are cheated out of a portion. Mr. Lipes has left a large number of heavy debts behind him, with no security for their payment. All of the property which remains is held on a mortgage and cannot be levied on. There is something very wrong in this matter and one thing is certain: his creditors believe him a swindler.
Two days later, a letter written by my third great-grandfather, Henry’s father-in-law, appeared in the paper. He asked to address the question of character that was raised by the “Is it a swindle?” headline. For nearly five years, Myron F. Barbour said, Henry had poured his every effort into the college.
Every dollar received for tuition fees, and a handsome patrimony given by his father has been expended to sustain the school, using barely enough to sustain himself and family during the time.
Two years ago, after paying about one thousand dollars to relieve the concerns from debt, I advised him to give up the effort, but he thought by redoubling his efforts and lessening his expenses, he might succeed. The result has shown that he was mistaken, and that after five years of incessant toil, he is compelled to give up the enterprise and now goes to Toledo without a dollar.
Until last Friday Mr. Lipes had no thought of giving up this college, and only when every source of help had been exhausted did he reluctantly yield to the unavoidable necessity of stopping the school.
I have no apology to offer for Mr. Lipes. He has failed. Yet I believe if we have ever had within our midst an honest, upright, moral Christian gentleman, toiling faithfully amid discouragement, patiently suffering disappointments, humbly determined to win the success which his skill and industry entitle him, Mr. Lipes may claim that distinction.
H.H. Lipes is not the first Fort Wayne man who failed to accomplish his undertakings, and I fear he will not be the last….
One word more: Every dollar of Mr. Lipes indebtedness will be paid just as soon as he can do it.
Myron expressed the hope that creditors would be patient with Henry, and stated his confidence that his son-in-law would be successful in Toledo as he was not in Fort Wayne. Later in the month, Henry also wrote the editor, with a somewhat self-righteous letter. He said he’d been called a swindler, a thief, and “everything degrading and disreputable.” He said he acted in good faith, labored unceasingly, and did not know he would have to close the college abruptly. He invited all those who had paid for coursework to come to Toledo to take classes from him - something a poor country boy could hardly attempt, as he surely knew. Yet he made it a solution to those who pre-paid tuition. He hadn't reneged on their coursework; they could simply come to Toledo and take the classes. He promised to pay his other creditors as soon as he was able. He ended with this: “Though I have been falsely charged with many bad acts, I have a clear conscience, and thank God that I am the accused and not the accuser.”
Henry was neither the first or last in the proprietary college industry to be accused of taking the money and running.
In March he’d evidently taken on a partner as his latest ad said “Lipes and Jordan.” Now going by the name Toledo Business University, they offered “all the common English branches” including phonography, elocution, philosophy, French, German and Latin - outside the normal scope of the “practical” business college. The usual penmanship, bookkeeping and mathematics were still taught, of course.
Heartbreak
In the summer of 1870 he was still grinding away trying to make his business college support a growing family, which now numbered three daughters. Sylvia’s mother Jane suffered from some sort of serious ailment and had gone blind. As she was unable to keep up with running a house any longer, her father sold their home and the Barbours moved into the largest, nicest boarding house in town, Hanna House. In steamy August, Jane was bedridden after the second of two serious falls. Sylvia took the children and went back to Fort Wayne care for her mother. Unexpectedly, her invalid sister Ella died suddenly during their stay.
The one ray of sunshine was little Clara Jane, aged four. The Fort Wayne Daily Democrat described her as, "Too young to feel the weight of sorrow the others felt -- unusually beautiful and mature for her age -- the very picture of health, and the solace and pride of the family circle." Then Clara got sick, and two days later she was dead.
"For such sorrow, there is no consolation," the newspaper accurately said.
From Professor to Student
July 1871 Jordan and Lipes ran another ad for the Toledo Business University. It was the last advertisement I could find. Soon, Henry was at last giving up his dream of being owner-operator of a proprietary college. In fact, he was becoming the student. Although Henry joined Second Presbyterian Church, where his father-in-law was president of the Board of Trustees, he’d been raised a Baptist. He enrolled in the Baptist Theological Seminary at what is now called the old University of Chicago. He would graduate from a “partial program,” whatever that meant, in 1873. The commercial colleges left him in debt; most likely his father and/or father-in-law supported the family and found the funds for him to be one of the tiny minority able to attend college.
Following graduation, the family would move constantly for decades as Henry served as a Presbyterian minister in one little church after another in small towns in northern Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and New York. There was an exception when they were back in the big city of Fort Wayne for a few years. Some of the places he served were Angola, Indiana; Portland, Indiana; Montague, Michigan; Tolono, Illinois; Urbana, Illinois; Kendallville, Indiana; and in New York: Dresden, Pen Yann, Nassau and finally, Schodack.
On the 1910 census, at age 70, retired from the ministry, he reportedly worked as a farmer, the occupation he’d avoided all his life.
In 1881 the Wharton School opened at the University of Pennsylvania as the first non-proprietary business school at a four-year college. In 1908, Harvard opened its business school. According to historian Steven Conn, the reason these schools were created was a desire for prestige and cultural cachet. “These people wanted businessmen to enjoy the same status as doctors and lawyers, and they felt the only way to get it was with a specialized degree in business -- though the actual business education those students got at the new business schools was often indistinguishable from what they would have received at the local proprietary school down the street,” he said.
Henry H. Lipes would surely feel gratified to hear that. As for the Bryant & Stratton chain, it exists today as Bryant & Stratton College, with eight locations and online. They even offer bachelor degrees.
Sources:
Angulo, A.J. “For Profit Colleges in American History,” Process: A Blog for American History, https://www.processhistory.org/angulo-for-profit-colleges/
“Bryant and Stratton Chain of Business Schools,” Ohio History Central, https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Bryant_%26_Stratton_Chain_of_Business_Schools
Conn, Steven. Nothing Succeeds Like Failure - The Sad History of American Business Schools, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Manual of the Second Presbyterian Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Fort Wayne: T.S. Taylor & Co., 1869.
Exhibition: Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 14 Dec 1865, p. 4.
“Monument For Mrs. George,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 18 Dec 1865, p. 2.
Dissolving Partnership: Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 10 Feb 1866, p.1.
“Token of Respect,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 3 April 1866, p. 3.
“Miss S.J. Fisher,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 3 April 1866, p. 3.
“Penmanship,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 24 Oct 1866, p. 4.
Improvements to College: Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 1 May 1867, p. 3.
“Latest By Telegraph,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 27 May 1867, p. 4.
“The Penmanship Class at the Commercial College,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 1 Nov 1867, p. 4.
“To the Citizens of Fort Wayne and Vicinity,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 25 Sept 1864, p. 4.
“Lipes Business College and Writing Institute,” The Freemont Weekly Journal (Freemont, Ohio), 30 Oct 1868, p. 3.
“American Business Institute,” The Times-Democrat (Lima, Ohio), 30 Dec 1868, p. 3.
“Is It a Swindle,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 4 Jan 1869, p. 4.
Myron F. Barbour’s Letter to the Editor: Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 6 Jan 1869, p. 4.
Henry Lipes Letter to the Editor: Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 30 Jan 1869, p. 4.
“Death,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 1 Sept 1870, p. 4.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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