In October 1983, Cushing Junior College of Bryn Mawr, PA, merged with Eastern University. Under the terms of the agreement, Cushing (CJC) contributed $25,000 as seed money for the endowment of Eastern`s Center for Counseling and Academic Support, and "Cushing" was added to the Center`s name. Why the Name "Cushing"? Ellen Winsor grew up in Boston and became a school teacher there. When she was 21, she went to Beaufort, SC, to start a school for former slaves. In addition, she started an orphanage and superintended Pope`s Plantation on St. Helena`s Island. She married one of the other volunteers, but less than two years later, the ship on which he was returning to Beaufort from New York was wrecked and he was lost. Ellen went home to Boston and became the Director of The Home for Little Wanderers, an orphanage. At nearby Newton Theological School was Josiah Nelson Cushing, actively seeking a wife in order to qualify as a missionary to Burma under the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. He and Ellen found each other and were married on her 26th birthday. The Cushings went to Burma as missionaries to the Shans, a displaced people. Josiah was a preacher, scholar, explorer, translator, and educator. While her husband worked in one part of the country, Ellen often worked in another. Although Josiah was recognized as the leading Shan language scholar in the world, one of the first pieces they published was a tract which Ellen translated into the Shan language. Today, there is a Cushing Hall named for them at the headquarters of the Burma Baptist Convention in Rangoon. When the Cushings` son was ready to enter Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, Ellen Cushing left Burma and became a field secretary of the Women`s Baptist Foreign Mission Society of Pennsylvania. A project of the Society was to start a training school for women who felt called to enter church vocations. For seven years, she stumped the state, trying to transform the dream into reality. In the summer of 1892, she met three young women who said they wanted to attend such a school. She told them to plan on coming, for there would be a school ready for them. Then she went back to the Society and told them they would have to get a school ready; they did, and Ellen Cushing became its first preceptress. The Cushing name represents the proud legacy of a woman and a school, both of which are preserved through the Cushing Center for Counseling and Academic Support at Eastern University. |  |
