Spring Hill College history

The bishop himself taught theology to the ecclesiastical students, who numbered six the first year. It stood on the site of the present Administration Building and opened for classes in November 1831.

Difficulties staffing the school persisted until 1847, when Portier recruited French Jesuits from Lyon to take over.

The first internationally acclaimed chess champion was Paul Morphy, a Spring Hill alumnus who was regarded as the best in the world in 1854.

The college purchased the house and property in 1903 from Stewart’s oldest daughter Annie Stewart Field.

Photo 2: In 1924, Babe Ruth visited Stan Galle Field to demonstrate his mighty swing in an exhibition game.

In 1932, the college launched an extension program with Saturday classes aimed at adults.

In the space vacated by the high school, the Jesuit House of Studies was opened in 1937, and the Scholasticate of the Sacred Heart opened on a site adjoining the college a few years later.

Fannie E. Motley was the first black graduate from the institution in 1956. It eventually admitted its first black students in September 1954, a few months after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v.

Fannie Motley, almunus of 1956

In 1960, he was named director of a worldwide web of seismic stations.

In his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. said he "commend[s] the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago."

In 2005, the Spring Hill nursing department led the way in the region to develop and implement a Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL) master’s program in conjunction with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

In January 2009, Spring Hill broke ground on a new student center, the first “green” building of its size in Mobile and one of the first of its kind in the state.