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The Southland College Papers comprise more than fifteen thousand items, including student records, financial records, minutes of the Southland Monthly Meeting and the Indiana Yearly Meeting, correspondence, photographs and glass lantern slides, and scrapbooks. The collection documents a significant aspect of African-American life in Arkansas, as well as the participation of the Quaker community in the education of African Americans in the South.

The collection contains some key documents in the history of the college and its relationship with the Quakers, such as a hand-written copy of the 1850 Articles of Incorporation of the Indiana Yearly Meeting and an 1876 document recording the establishment of the college. Some documents provide insight into nineteenth-century school administration, including records of student attendance, a "daily register of punctuality," reports of grades and deportment, and student demerit books, which recorded the names of students and the infractions they committed. A ledger contains names of graduates between 1876 and 1924, and other records include the monthly financial reports, lists of contributors to the college, and records of medical treatment of students.

More than three hundred photographs are in the collection, as well as fifty glass lantern slides. They generally date from 1910 through the 1920s. They include portraits of faculty and students, group pictures of faculty members, pictures of alumni and their children, and student activities like domestic science classes, baseball and croquet games, and the Southland Spring Fair. There are photographs of the physical plant, including the chapel, dining room, the wood house, and the school laundry.

Southland College was one of the first private institutions in the South devoted to the education of African Americans. It was established at Helena, Arkansas, as an asylum for lost and abandoned children in 1864, out of the chaos of the Civil War, by the Friends' Freedmen Committee of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers). Two years later, with the support of the 56th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, the orphanage evolved into a school, located on thirty acres of land northwest of Helena at Lexa. It was administered by the Quakers and the Freedmen's Bureau until the latter organization was dissolved in 1869, when the school was taken up by the missionary board of the Indiana Yearly Meeting.

In 1869 the curriculum was enlarged to include a normal course, and by 1874 sixty teachers had been trained. The school was then renamed Southland College, to reflect its higher status, and diplomas were granted beginning in 1876. In 1880 the college hired its own graduates, becoming one of the first racially integrated faculties in the South. By 1886 the college had nearly three hundred students.

The Friends interested themselves in the spiritual formation of the Southland students, and in 1876 recognized the Southland Monthly Meeting. In 1898 Chandler Paschal, a member of the first graduating class, was designated minister.

The financial resources of Southland were always inadequate to the demands upon them. Tuition could naturally account for only a very small portion of the college's income, and despite grants and donations from other meetings through the Board of Home Missions, the institution was never able to overcome financial setbacks resulting from fire, drought, and the deterioration of the physical plant over time. Southland closed its operations at the end of the spring term in 1925.

Access to the Southland College Papers is open to students, faculty, and others upon application to the Special Collections staff. Researchers may direct inquiries to Special Collections, but extensive projects may require a visit to the archives. To facilitate their work, researchers who wish to use the papers are advised to write or telephone the division in advance.

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