Wartburg College Historic District

About this property

Wartburg College is a private Lutheran liberal arts college in Waverly, Iowa. Wartburg College was founded in 1852 in Saginaw, Michigan, by Georg M. Grossmann, a native of Neuendettelsau, Bavaria. Pastor Wilhelm Löhe sent Grossmann to establish a pastor training school for German immigrants. The college moved many times between Illinois and Iowa before settling in Waverly in 1935. Also in 1935, St. Paul Luther College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, merged with Wartburg College. The college is named after Wartburg Castle in Eisenach, Germany, where Martin Luther was protected during the stormy days of the Reformation. While in the Castle, he translated the New Testament from its original Greek into German, the language of the people. Student and alumni groups often travel to the castle, and the Wartburg Choir has performed there several times. Waverly and Eisenach are sister towns and often swap foreign exchange students. The college is proud of its German heritage and celebrates an annual student-declared one-day holiday, Outfly, a deliberately mistaken translation of the German noun Ausflug. Outfly is the most enduring Wartburg tradition. The first mention of Ausflug comes from Mendota, Illinois, in 1883, when students went on a Friday-Saturday excursion to nearby Starved Rock, now a state park. Faculty minutes for October 5, 1892, note that Ausflug was scheduled for the next day. Old Main, the oldest building on campus, was built in 1880 for the Wartburg Teachers Seminary. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 under the name Wartburg Teachers' Seminary. The longstanding rivalry between Wartburg and Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, has produced some colorful moments. The rivalry's origins are unclear. Stories of pranks date to the 1940s. For the most part, the rivalry has been characterized by fun and good sportsmanship. It rose to new heights in October 1996, when two Wartburg cross-country runners rented a light plane, flew to Decorah, and dropped leaflets on the Luther campus. The incident was reported in every major Iowa newspaper, got national mention on Fox, and made Rolling Stone magazine's list of the most memorable college pranks of 1996–97. The creativity in the rivalry continued when student staff members of the college radio station, KWAR, secretly entered a float in the Luther College Homecoming Parade. The staff members decorated the float as an environmental club, the "Organization of Nature Enthusiasts", from Luther College. In front of the judges' stand the float quickly changed color from blue and white to orange and black. It continued all the way through town and onto Luther's campus, with numerous Wartburg students joining the procession from the crowd.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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