Norma Camilla Brown

(1899-1964)

Eureka College alumnus (Class of 1920); Eureka College employee (1955-1964)

For the past thirty-seven years, Brown Hall has stood upon this campus but few are aware of its name or the story behind that name. One of the few buildings on the Eureka College campus officially named in honor of a woman isn't. (If that last sentence seems abrupt it served its purpose.)

1920 was an important year for women's history in the United States. Women voted nationally for the first time in the November 1920 presidential election upon final ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (the "Anthony Amendment") to the U.S. Constitution that extended suffrage rights to all women over the age of twenty-one. In addition to gaining the right to vote in 1920, the year ushered in the decade that would become characterized by the flamboyant "flapper" stereotype of the liberated woman. Freed from previous constraints, these women danced, smoked, and regularly violated the much hated policy of Prohibition—or at least that's what we are often led to believe was the new normal of the times.

Norma Camilla Brown graduated from Eureka College in 1920 but she did not fit the stereotype of the 1920s era woman. A native of Bloomington, Illinois, Brown grew up in a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) household and she attended Eureka College in order to pursue her studies in religion. Upon graduating magna cum laude, Brown blazed a career path that was almost exclusively male at the time. Norma Camilla Brown became a minister.

Brown's rise within the church community was meteoric. She first served as a pastor in the rural community of Carlock from 1920-1921, and she then spent a year serving as the Chaplain of the Illinois State Senate. As a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Brown was an advocate of national prohibition legislation. She decided to use her capable skills as a public speaker and her passionate interest in the temperance cause to inform a national audience of the evils associated with alcohol. For a decade, from 1931 to 1941, Brown was a national lecturer who worked with the Flying Squadron, a group of temperance reformers who promoted the WCTU cause both during and after Prohibition. Utilizing the relatively new technology of the airplane, the temperance reformers in the Flying Squadron fanned out across the country in military precision speaking at venues both large and small.

After finishing her work with the Flying Squadron, Brown held other positions and pastorates within the church. She worked with the Christian Church (Disciple of Christ) National Forum from 1931 to 1940. She served as a pastor in Gerlaw from 1941-1945 before becoming the director of the Illinois Disciples Foundation from 1945-1947. Her last pastorate was at a church in Mt. Sterling from 1947 to 1955.

When Ira W. Langston became president of Eureka College in 1954 he worked hard to get Norma Brown to come back to Eureka College and serve her alma mater in an important capacity. Brown returned to the campus to be the Alumni Secretary and Associate Director of Development for Eureka College from 1955 to her death in 1964. Since President Langston was hoping to get accreditation restored to Eureka College (this had been lost during the Great Depression), it was imperative to maintain excellent relations with both the alumni and with the church community. President Langston believed that Norma C. Brown was ideally suited to do these things and to generate the revenues that were necessary to sustain the institution.

As a pastor, Norma Brown also understood the significance of story and the power of ritual. We all owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude for preserving and maintaining one of the canonical stories of Eureka College that is perhaps only second in importance to the story of the Founding. Norma Brown helped to preserve, tell, and commemorate the story of the Recruiting Elm. In 1960 when the old tree had to be removed because it had long been diseased and was becoming a safety concern, Brown organized a commemoration ceremony as the tree was removed and the story of our student-soldiers was retold almost a century after the boys had heroically marched off to war.

Stories have a powerful ability to elicit an affective response from those who hear and internalize meaning. Ritual has a way of drawing people to a place that is larger and more profound than themselves. Those who gathered at the Recruiting Elm ceremony, like young Loren L. Logsdon (Class of 1958), may not have realized it at the time, but Norma Brown was pastoring to the community in ways that were both subtle and sublime.

And now back to Brown Hall . . . In 1970 Eureka College dedicated a new residence hall complex that was called Alumni Court. The complex was designed with two separate buildings that were connected with a hall/foyer area. The building to the north was named Brown Hall and the building to the south was named Jackson Hall. The two buildings were connected by Harrod lounge. Today Brown Hall remains known by the generic name Alumni "B" and "C" – hardly a name of distinction.