Salem College — Babcock Dormitory

Salem College traces its founding to 1772, when the Moravian Church established a school for girls in the newly planned settlement of Salem, North Carolina. The school predates the American republic and the first university systems in the country, making it the oldest continuously operating women's college in the United States — a status that gives the institution a particular kind of historical weight among American educational institutions.

The college occupies a campus directly adjacent to the Old Salem Museums & Gardens historic district, with several buildings dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside later academic construction. The architecture reflects the Moravian congregation's tradition of careful, long-lasting construction in brick and stone.

Babcock Dormitory is named for Mary Reynolds Babcock, who lived from 1908 to 1953. Mary was the daughter of Richard Joshua Reynolds Jr., the son of the tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds Sr. She was a significant philanthropist, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation — which she established — continues as an active grant-making organization in the American South. Her connection to Salem College and the dormitory that bears her name reflects the Reynolds family's long relationship with Winston-Salem institutions.

A formal portrait of Mary Reynolds Babcock hangs in a corridor of Babcock Dormitory. Students at Salem College have maintained a tradition of greeting the portrait when passing and bidding it farewell when leaving for breaks — a practice that reflects the portrait's place in campus culture as much as genuine belief in its supernatural properties.