Eliza Burks Payne, who attended high school program, kept detailed scrapbook about her time on Lindsey Wilson Hill in the early 1920s.
by Duane Bonifer
COLUMBIA, KY. (12/03/2025) Lindsey Wilson University will hold its first commencement ceremony on Saturday, Dec. 13. It will be the 122nd commencement ceremony in the school’s history, and it will be the largest class with a total of 974 undergraduate and graduate degrees to be awarded.
That’s 963 more students than were recognized at the first commencement ceremony in which Lindsey Wilson awarded a college degree. That ceremony was held in May 1925 when Lindsey Wilson awarded degrees to 11 members of the Class of 1925, the first cohort of students to graduate from the two-year-old junior college program.
And thanks to a recent gift to the university’s archives from longtime supporter Eleanor Harden of Louisville, Kentucky, more is known about those formative years in Lindsey Wilson history.
Harden donated a scrapbook, which included a class ring, that was maintained by her late aunt Eliza Burks Payne, who graduated in 1925 from the Lindsey Wilson high school program. Payne died in 2000 at the age of 92.
The Class of 1925
Lindsey Wilson was founded in 1903 as a training school for Vanderbilt University, and from its first years it offered elementary and high school programs. A junior college curriculum was added in 1923.
Payne was one of 20 high school graduates from Lindsey Wilson in 1925, but a lot of the attention that May was on the first 11 graduates of the new junior college at what was then called Lindsey-Wilson. The first junior college commencement was held on May 14, 1925, in the school’s chapel, which is now V.P. Henry Auditorium.
“It was an evening of great interest and importance when Lindsey-Wilson’s first college class appeared Thursday evening in cap and gown and were awarded diplomas for work faithfully performed since September 1923, when Lindsey-Wilson became a Junior-College,” the Adair County News reported in an article that Payne saved.
R.V. Bennett, the school’s first president who also taught mathematics and geometry classes, presided over the ceremony, which got underway at 8 p.m.
After Sada Muilinix “rendered a beautiful piano solo,” the News reported that an address was given by the Rev. Baxter W. Napier of Bowling Green, Kentucky, “and it proved to be one of unusual force, and was delivered in a most appealing manner.”
Napier spoke about “Building a Life,” and the News article observed the “rapt attention upon the part of the audience was evidence of how much it was enjoyed and how well it was received.”
The following evening, May 15, certificates of promotion were presented to 17 eighth graders, then diplomas were presented to a record 20 graduates of the high school program. The certificates and diplomas were presented by current professor and future Lindsey Wilson President A.P. White because Bennett was out of town. The News article explained that Bennett was in Hartford, Kentucky, “for the purpose of delivering a class address for the school at that place.”
From Addison to Columbia
Payne, who grew up in the Breckinridge County community of Addison, Kentucky, attended Lindsey Wilson along with her three siblings, but she was the only one to earn a diploma from the school.
Harden reckons that her aunt and her siblings attended Lindsey Wilson because Payne’s father, Daniel Stephen Burks, was a strong Methodist and the family farm was located near Holt Chapel, a Methodist church and Gothic revival structure built by the famous Kentuckian Joseph Holt in honor of his mother. Holt Chapel was demolished in 1987.
To travel to Columbia from Addison, Payne would have taken a train to Elizabethtown and then maybe another train to Campbellsville. The last part of her journey would have probably been by a horse-pulled stagecoach from Campbellsville to Columbia.
While a Lindsey Wilson student, Payne was active in campus life. She performed the piano at recitals, and she was involved with the Frogge Literary Society, a social group that was named in honor of S.L. Frogge, Lindsey Wilson’s second principal.
Payne was also a member of the girls’ basketball team, which competed in the “Sixth Annual Basket Ball Championship,” held March 13-15, 1924, for the boys’ and girls’ teams at the University of Kentucky. Lindsey Wilson, who was not yet known as the Blue Raiders, lost 12-5 in the first round to Pikeville in what was then an 18-team tournament.
Payne’s basketball team, which featured eight players in 1923-24, played its home games in the W.W. Slider Humanities Center, which was then referred to as the school’s gymnasium and dining hall.
As Payne wrote on one of the pages of the donated scrapbook that includes a picture of what was then a new building on campus: “In the upper story we have spent many happy hours playing basket ball. In the lower story our time was spent eating corn bread and beans. These good times will long be remembered.”
After Lindsey Wilson, Payne attended Western Kentucky State Normal School and Teachers College in Bowling Green (now Western Kentucky University), which had awarded its first baccalaureate degrees in 1924. She enjoyed a successful career as a high school math teacher in Owensboro, Kentucky, and then in her native Breckinridge County.
‘A fun, fun aunt’
Payne and her husband, Frank, were married in 1947. The Paynes didn’t have any children, so Harden said she became a kind of surrogate daughter to her aunt. Harden often traveled with her aunt.
“She was just a fun, fun aunt,” said Harden.
Payne remained a basketball fan throughout her life, traveling to Louisville in 1965 to watch Kentucky Mr. Basketball and future NBA star Butch Beard of Hardinsburg lead Breckinridge County to the state title.
Harden said that her aunt, who moved to Louisville permanently later in life, was remembered by her former students as a teacher who always challenged them. One of her former students, the insurance executive Myra Tobin, told Harden that “she was a hard math teacher, but she was good.”
Although Payne does not express any career plans in the scrapbook, there is an indication that mathematics and geometry were often on her mind. On one page, she wrote: “We have thought so constantly of geometry that some of us even reason in circles, dream of triangles and parallelograms (no to mention pi) and so jumble them up that Mr. Bennett is, on some occasions, unable to extract any one clear figure from our minds.”
Alumni and friends who have Lindsey Wilson materials they would like to donate to the university’s archives may contact the Alumni Office at alumni@lindsey.edu or 270-384-8400.
Eleanor Harden of Louisville, Kentucky, holds a newspaper clipping that features the 1923-24 Lindsey Wilson high school girls’ basketball team that included her aunt, the late Eliza Burks Payne. Payne, who graduated in 1925 from the Lindsey Wilson high school program, is third from right.
A scrapbook maintained by the late Eliza Burks Payne, third from right, includes this picture of the 1923-24 Lindsey Wilson high school girls’ basketball team. Payne graduated in 1925 from the Lindsey Wilson high school program.
Lindsey Wilson University’s W.W. Slider Humanities Center was built in the early 1920s. When the late Eliza Burks Payne was a student at the school in the 1920s, it was referred to as the school’s gymnasium and dining hall.
A picture of 10 of the first 11 graduates of Lindsey Wilson Junior College in May 1925, from one of the pages of the scrapbook maintained by the late Eliza Burks Payne when she was enrolled in Lindsey Wilson’s high school program.
A picture of the Frogge Literary Society, one of at least two literary societies formed during the first three decades of Lindsey Wilson, from a scrapbook maintained by the late Eliza Burks Payne when she was enrolled in Lindsey Wilson’s high school program. The literary society was named in honor of S.L. Frogge, who was the second principal of Lindsey Wilson Training School from 1903-04.
Lindsey Wilson University is a vibrant liberal arts university in Columbia, Kentucky. Founded in 1903 and affiliated with The United Methodist Church, the mission of Lindsey Wilson is to serve the educational needs of students by providing a living-learning environment within an atmosphere of active caring and Christian concern where every student, every day, learns and grows and feels like a real human being. Lindsey Wilson offers 28 undergraduate majors, five graduate programs and a doctoral program. The university’s 29 intercollegiate varsity athletic teams have won more than 120 team and individual national championships.
(Duane Bonifer – Lindsey Wilson University)