Background

James Evans Rhoads was born on January 21, 1828 in Marple, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. He was named simply James Rhoads, and assumed the middle initial "E" rather reluctantly in order to avoid confusion with others of his name. The farm where he and his six brothers and sisters grew up had been in the possession of the Rhoads family since the time of their settlement in America about 1690. His father, Joseph Rhoads, and his mother, Hannah (Evans), both belonged to families which had joined the Society of Friends in the seventeenth century in England, and had furnished leaders to the Society in Pennsylvania.

Education

Rhoads attended Westtown School, the leading Quaker school in the neighborhood of Marple, and studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his degree in 1851.

Career

After serving 1852-54 as resident physician at Pennsylvania Hospital, he became a general practitioner in Germantown.

In 1862 he suffered a slight paralytic stroke and after his return from six months' recuperation in Europe he did not attempt to resume his practice but devoted himself to philanthropic and educational work. The first cause which enlisted his efforts was the work among the freedmen, whose education and guidance at the close of the Civil War was one of the greatest problems facing the nation. Within a few years he also became deeply interested in the American Indians.

With the inauguration of a new Indian policy by President Grant, the Society of Friends took a leading part in the educational and missionary work on the Indian reservations, and Rhoads was made secretary of the executive committee of the central organization. He was also for several years president of the Indian Rights Association which had its headquarters in Philadelphia.

From 1876 to 1884 he was editor of the Friends' Review, a weekly periodical published in Philadelphia. As a leader among the orthodox Friends it was natural that he should be named by Dr. Joseph Taylor, whom he had known for many years, as one of the original trustees of Bryn Mawr College, the institution for higher learning for women which Dr. Taylor proposed to found and to which he left the greater part of his fortune on his death in 1880. The site for the college, ten miles from Philadelphia, had been selected, and the buildings begun by Taylor himself, but after his death it remained for the trustees to choose the officers and settle the policy for the new institution.

In 1883 Rhoads was appointed the first president and Miss M. Carey Thomas the first dean, and in 1885 Bryn Mawr College was opened. The distinctive features of the new college, which was the first institution of the kind outside of New England and New York, were the high standard of its entrance requirements, the inclusion in its plan of study of the "group system" which had just been introduced into Johns Hopkins University and which was designed to give to each student an opportunity for a certain degree of concentration in a selected field, and the graduate work, which was not offered at any of the other women's colleges.

Before retiring from the presidency in 1894 he saw the new college, well out of the experimental stage, recognized as one of the leading institutions of learning in the United States. He died very suddenly, at Bryn Mawr, in 1895.

Achievements

• Rhoads was successful from the first in gathering a faculty distinguished in scholarship and active in research.

Works

More photos

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  • Four Lectures on Some of the Distinguishing Views of Friends: Delivered in Twelfth Street Meeting-House, Philad'a by Request of the Overseers of That Meeting; 1890 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Four Lectures on Some of the Distinguishing ...)

  • Friends' Review, 1877-'78, Vol. 31: A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Friends' Review, 1877-'78, Vol. 31: A Religi...)

  • Friends' Review, 1880-81, Vol. 34: A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Friends' Review, 1880-81, Vol. 34: A Religio...)

Personality

It was said by those who knew him that Rhoads had too sympathetic and too selfless a nature to be able to endure for very long the demands of a large medical practice.

Connections

On March 21, 1860, he married Margaret Wilson Ely, of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and the eldest of their three children was born in 1863.

Father:

Joseph Rhoads Rhoads

Mother:

Hannah (Evans) Rhoads

Spouse:

Margaret Wilson Ely