Pacific Union College: A History of Adventist Education in California
Pacific Union College (PUC) is a private Seventh-day Adventist liberal arts college located in Angwin, California. Accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission, PUC offers a variety of undergraduate majors and programs. Its history is deeply intertwined with the growth of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on the West Coast and its commitment to education.
Founding and Early Years in Healdsburg (1882-1909)
The story of Pacific Union College begins with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has long had a strong commitment to education. In 1874, the church founded its first college in Battle Creek, Michigan. The creation of schools in California was urged by Ellen G. White and other church leaders in an effort to accommodate the Adventist Church's growing membership on the West Coast and to train young Adventists for its work.
In October 1881, the California Conference decided to establish a school in its territory during its annual camp meeting near Sacramento. Church membership in California had grown, creating demand for higher education for its members, with Battle Creek College being too far away. Ellen G. White supported the idea, though Conference President Stephen N. Haskell initially argued against it due to existing debt.
The college was founded as Healdsburg Academy in Healdsburg, California, in northern Sonoma County, in 1882. Fifteen miles north of Santa Rosa, in the vineyards of Healdsburg, they found ideal property and purchased an imposing, fully furnished brick structure just off Healdsburg's main street. The academy officially opened on April 11 of that year with two teachers and twenty-six students. Sidney Brownsberger, recruited from Michigan, served as its first President. Just a few months later, the school's name was changed to Healdsburg College.
Under Brownsberger's leadership, the academy focused on both conventional study of standard subjects as well as practical skills, such as dressmaking, blacksmithing, carpentry, and cooking, in line with White's desire for the college.
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Despite the name change, most of Healdsburg’s early students were elementary or secondary. At the college level, Healdsburg’s program offerings included a Biblical course, a science course, a classical course, and the normal (teacher training) program. Important faculty at Healdsburg included Alma McKibbin, Alonzo T. Jones, and Roderick S. Owen. Regardless of their program, students-as well as faculty-were required to work in the college industries, which included shoemaking, tentmaking, blacksmithing, animal husbandry (of cows and horses), and gardening. The industries were supposed to provide income for the college to help it stay financially solvent, but they often had the opposite effect.
The Move to Angwin (1909)
The lengthy tenure of William C. White, son of Ellen G. White, as board chairman was a period of significant development. However, financial difficulties and a fire in 1904 led to the closure of the college in 1906. Despite this failure, many church leaders - including White herself - continued to push for expanded Adventist schooling, and efforts were begun in the 1900s to find a new location to rebuild the college. Healdsburg College had been built on the outskirts of town in 1882, but by the turn of the twentieth century, the town had grown up around it, bringing secular influences to the doorsteps of this religious institution. “While men slept,” Ellen White remarked,” the devil sowed houses.” The growth of Healdsburg town and the college’s ballooning debt prompted the relocation of the institution to the village of Angwin in Napa County.
Eventually, in 1909, the Pacific Union Conference announced that it had found an opening to purchase the 1,636 acres of the Angwin Resort on Howell Mountain in neighboring Napa County. The property had been found through the church's St. Helena connection, with Ellen White advising on the suitability of various options. After some initial disappointments, especially over a location at Buena Vista near Sonoma that had seemed suitable, a resort property at Angwin was investigated.
As Ellen White stated, "As I have looked over this property I pronounce it to be superior in many respects. The school could not be located in a better spot…We realize that the Lord knew what we needed and that it is His providence that brought us here.… God wanted us here and He has placed us here." Consequently, in 1909 the church bought the Angwin Resort in the mountains above St. Helena. The total cost was $60,000, and Pacific Union College was dedicated there on September 29, 1909. Dormitories, classrooms, and faculty homes were created out of the resort’s hotel, bowling alleys, and cottages. Other buildings were constructed using the readily available timber from the property. It also had the advantage of being near another Adventist institution, St. Helena Sanitarium. More important even than the physical structure was the spiritual plan. Now we need not wait any longer; our school can assemble and the work begin at once. And at its very beginning, let us determine to walk humbly with God. Let us seek to make such a representation as is given to us in the words I have read to you today. If we will do this-if we will walk in God's ways and keep His charge-the light of Heaven will certainly shine upon us. She even noted the issue of access to Angwin and the long road uphill, noting that, “It is true that there is a long hill to climb in order to reach the place, but that is not altogether a disadvantage.
The reconstituted college on Howell Mountain was dedicated on September 29, 1909, just weeks after the purchase of Angwin’s resort. Over the following years, students and faculty of the college built the campus by hand using lumber felled on the college’s land. Initially, the college repurposed the original resort buildings. The dance hall served as the chapel. The bowling alley was partitioned into classrooms. Female students lived in the hotel, while male students lived in tents, barn lofts, or the cellar of the dance hall.
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Early 20th Century: Growth and Challenges
PUC's first president at Angwin was Charles W. Irwin, who served from the opening of the new location until 1921.
In its first decade on Howell Mountain, PUC had to contend with two major upheavals: World War I and the Influenza Pandemic. During the war, male students were drafted from the college to fight against the Central Powers, although President Irwin petitioned for draft exemptions for theology students. PUC’s isolation was probably an asset during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. Nevertheless, seventy students contracted influenza and had to go to a makeshift flu ward on the fourth floor of South Hall. Everyone in the college was quarantined for six weeks as per standard practice at the time.
The first building constructed for the college campus was South Hall, now known as Graf Hall, built to be the women’s dorm. The second new building was a combined administration-classroom-chapel building, eventually named Irwin Hall, after Charles Walter Irwin, the president who had moved the college to Angwin and guided it through its formative years from 1909 to 1921. The building was constructed on a site between the old hotel and South Hall, on a shelf of earth-fill scraped from the hillside and moved in mine cars from the nearby Aetna Springs mercury mine. Construction took place in two phases, the first in 1913 and the second in 1919, with further modifications following in the 1930s.13 The original sixteen classrooms, built in 1913, were constructed in an unusual fan shape, an arrangement that allowed an observer to look down all five hallways on either side of the classrooms at once. This permitted a college disciplinarian to monitor if any student was late for class. President Irwin conceived the idea for this arrangement and the multitalented, indefatigable professor Myron Wallace Newton and shop teacher George Carlson implemented it. As built, the classrooms lacked outside walls; skylights provided illumination, but these leaked profusely in the rainy winters. The classrooms also had separate doors for male and female students, as administrators monitored all fraternization between the sexes and strictly prohibited any dating in the early days of the college.14 The chapel, added in 1919, featured fine oak paneling and an elaborate ceiling designed by George Carlson.
Located as it was at the top of a long road up from the valley, PUC started out isolated from Napa Valley and the world beyond. A trip down to St. Helena in the college surrey was a dusty, tedious two-hour ride in the best of conditions. As far as possible, the college had to be socially self-sufficient-if not economically so. The college organized picnics in its forest properties and game nights in the old resort buildings. Administration reluctantly allowed non-competitive baseball games at picnics. Eventually, the college would also host movie nights and travelogues in the Irwin Hall auditorium. PUC’s isolation was an intentional part of its educational plan. The church leadership did not want to repeat the experience of Healdsburg College, whose property had been swallowed up by a secular town. Accordingly, as George R.
Expansion and Accreditation (1920s-1930s)
Pacific Union College prospered in the 1920s, along with the rest of the United States economy. In this decade, the college launched the Campus Chronicle (student newspaper, 1925) and Diogenes Lantern (yearbook, 1927). Also at this time, the old Angwin hotel, known as North Hall, was demolished and a new purpose-built dormitory for male students was built on its site. The new dorm was named Grainger Hall, after William C. Grainger, the second president of Healdsburg College (1886-1894), who died in 1899 on mission to Japan.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, PUC expanded its educational programs with the goal of receiving educational accreditation. Driven by suggestions from the college's board, PUC required that professors have postgraduate degrees to teach, created lower and upper divisions, introduced major and minor degrees, and necessitated the completion of senior theses for graduation. This era also saw further expansion of the campus community through the construction of more facilities - including new men's dormitories and its current gymnasium - as well as through the creation of the college's first student association, the Associated Students of Pacific Union College (ASPUC), in January 1935.
In the 1930s, PUC faced hard times during the Great Depression. To make up for lost revenue, the college cut faculty salaries and had to let some faculty members go. Despite the hard times of the decade, the college was able to undertake some construction projects. A new Science Hall was built next to the Administration Building in 1930; it was later named Clark Hall, in honor of Harold W. Clark, a long-serving biology teacher at PUC and an influential early creationist. Paulin Hall, the first of two buildings to bear the name on campus, was built below Graf Hall in 1932. Initially the home of the Music Department, the building was ultimately taken over by the English Department and renamed Stauffer Hall, in honor of English professor J. Paul Stauffer. Meanwhile, the Administration Building got a substantial renovation in 1935. The classrooms with their leaky skylights were torn down. President Walter I. Smith (1934-1943) felt that the centralized surveillance of the fan-shaped hallways was outdated and unnecessary; these classrooms were replaced by a larger wing with two stories. The facade of the building was also renovated in a modern Art Deco style, designed by academy principal Richard Lewis.
Two long-reaching changes of the Depression era were accreditation and the beginnings of graduate education. PUC was the first Adventist institution of higher learning to attain accreditation, first from the denomination’s own Board of Regents (1932) and subsequently by the Northwest Association of Secondary and Higher Schools (1933). By seeking accreditation, PUC and other Adventist colleges that followed its lead embraced Liberal Arts education and moved away from vocational or industrial training; in the following decades, college industries like the book bindery and dairy scaled down operations and ultimately closed. As for graduate education, PUC took the first steps in that direction by hosting the Advanced Bible School during the summers from 1934 to 1936, after which the program moved to Washington, DC, to become the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary.
In 1932, the college was the first school to meet the church’s Board of Regents’ standards for college accreditation. The following year it was accredited by the Northwest Association of Secondary and Higher Schools, the first Adventist college to receive this. In 1951, accreditation also came from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Graduate work began at Pacific Union College in 1934 when a highly successful summer program called the Advanced Bible School was begun.
World War II and Post-War Expansion
World War II, which began for the United States in 1941, had a profound influence on PUC, despite the college’s isolation. Angwin and neighboring communities held air raid and emergency evacuation drills. More than 400 PUC students and alumni served in the conflict, many of whom received preliminary training in first-aid, stretcher-bearing, and drilling in the Medical Cadet Corps on campus. Under Executive Order 9066, issei (Japanese immigrants) and nisei (American-born children of issei) in the West Coast states were interned in camps for the duration of the war, including fourteen PUC students. Some of these internees were members of the class of 1942, who were forced to leave campus immediately before their graduation.
Pacific Union College reached its peak student enrollment in the decades after World War II. During the war years, enrollment had hovered slightly above 600 before dipping to 538 in the last year of the war. Then, as the war ended, enrollment exploded: 900 students in 1946-1947, 910 the following year, and over a thousand from 1948 to 1951. The size of the graduating class grew during this period as well, from 55 seniors in 1945 to 163 in 1950. This was a common trend experienced by many other institutions of higher education across the country: people who had put their lives on hold during the Great Depression and the war now found that they could continue with their education. In addition, young men who had served in the war took advantage of GI Bill funding from the federal government to complete their education. More than a million veterans attended colleges and universities nationwide in the years immediately after the war. To meet the increased demand, the college necessarily expanded campus facilities. Two new dorms housed the influx of students: Andre Hall, for women, was completed in 1949, and Newton Hall, for men, was built in 1951. Veteran Heights, an orderly village of Quonset huts located on a plateau above the main campus, housed veterans and their families. The college also acquired a few war-surplus buildings, including a gymnasium that was still in use in 2025. During and immediately after World War II, presidents Henry J. Klooster (1943-1945) and Percy W. Christian (1945-1950) oversaw the professionalization of the faculty.
Pacific Union College Today
Pacific Union College is the only four-year college located in Napa County, California. It offers around 60 undergraduate majors in various fields, along with other types of programs. Though the range of its offerings is quite broad, PUC's most prominent programs are those in the health sciences, which are sought out by a considerable number of those who attend. PUC maintains an especially close connection to Loma Linda University School of Medicine, another Adventist institution, and most of the college's pre-professional programs are meant specifically for admission into Loma Linda. The college has sent a steady stream of students to the university for several decades.
Within PUC's student body, the three largest ethnic demographics are Hispanic (31% in fall 2021), Asian (23%), and White (21%), while the remaining quarter includes Black students and others. Female students make up a majority of those on campus (63%), while male students comprise about a third (37%).
Pacific Union College has had a total of twenty-four presidents. In 1983, Malcolm Maxwell became the first alumnus to lead PUC, serving for a record 18 years. The current president is Ralph Trecartin, who assumed office in 2021.
Since 2007, Bon Appétite has catered the PUC Dining Commons. The college's main library is the Nelson Memorial Library, with holdings of around 150,000 books. It also houses the Pitcairn Islands Study Center, with a collection of materials about the Pitcairn Islands, as well as literary collections for various figures in Adventist history. The college owns as operates the Albion Field Station, in Mendocino County, on the Albion River by the Pacific coast. Pacific Union College owns and operates Angwin-Parrett Field, a public use airport located on its campus. Much of the school's undeveloped acreage is managed as the PUC Demonstration & Experimental Forest, which spans roughly 1,600 acres (6.5 km2). In 2018, PUC partnered with the Napa County Land Trust to preserve the forest as a conservation easement; the easement is currently held by CalFire. Covering 864 acres (3.50 km2), the easement protects about half of college's total property. Still, with a network of hiking trails spanning 35 miles, the forest sees regular use.
Student Life and Activities
The Pacific Union College Student Association (PUCSA) was started in 1887, just five years after the college was founded. It consists of an executive branch and a Student Senate. There are more than 50 clubs, Honor's Associations and Student Ministries active on campus at Pacific Union College. These include the Secular Student Alliance, Biology Club, Asian Student Association, Pre-Med Club, Korean Adventist Student Association, Dramatic Arts Society, Musical Arts Symposium, Homeless Ministry, Psi Chi, College Democrats and others. A gay-straight alliance, Gay and Straight People (GASP), has operated on campus since October 2008.
The Pacific Union athletic teams are called the Pioneers.
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