In its day, H. Sophie Newcomb College, now the Newcomb Institute-Tulane University, was a major institution of higher learning for women. As to its name, in 1886 Josephine Louise Newcomb donated $100,000 to Tulane University to establish the college and name it for her 15-year-old daughter Sophie who died in 1870. By the time Josephine died in 1901, through her will, she had donated $3.6 million to the college.
Then comes the question, where was the college located? Most people only recall the Newcomb complex on the Tulane campus facing Broadway. But that wasn’t its original home.
When Newcomb opened in 1887, the Tulane Board chose a two-story mansion that once stood on the corner of Camp and what is now Howard Avenue with its backyard facing Lee Circle. The 1906 photograph seen here depicts Newcomb’s second home on Washington Ave.
According to a 1928 history of Newcomb by its first president, Brandt V.B. Dixon, the college quickly outgrew the Camp St. site. In 1890, Dixon lobbied the Tulane Board to purchase the 1854 Robb-Burnside Mansion at 1220 Washington Ave. in the Garden District. The board turned him down. Instead, it bought the property not for Newcomb but for Tulane’s prep high school for boys. Annoyed by the decision, Dixon worked behind-the-scenes to persuade Mrs. Newcomb to send the board a letter, requesting the site be used for Newcomb College. She did and included a $25,000 check to pay for renovations. The board capitulated.
Dixon describes the Garden District property:
“It was a large square three acres in extent, covered with a variety of beautiful trees — live oak, laurel, tulip, palm, camphor, and others — beside much shrubbery and flowers…. The place had been attractive to me from the time I first saw it, but possession made it a paradise, especially for the girls…
“The main building, a fine example of Italian renaissance architecture, had been erected about 40 years before, and handsomely finished and decorated. The heavy mahogany doors still swung smoothly…and the decorations on walls and ceilings were, for the most part, undimmed. The ‘octagonal room’ was a hall of mirrors. Four of these had been so arranged that, by mutual reflection, one might look down a vista, which only ended when the light became too dim to excite the eye. This room was decorated in Pompeian fashion, and rumor had it that artists had been imported from Italy for the work…Another rumor about this building was to the effect that in the Civil War, General Butler, the Federal commander, had selected it as his headquarters, and ordered the owner to move out, but as he happened to be a British subject the order was not effective.”
By 1917 Newcomb and Tulane officials decided Newcomb needed more up-to-date facilities to keep up with other prestigious colleges for women up East. In early 1918, Newcomb staff and students moved to its new Broadway location.
The Tulane board then sold the Washington Avenue campus to the Baptist Bible Institute, now the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, which remained there until 1953 when it moved to Gentilly Boulevard. When nobody stepped up to buy the complex, the buildings were demolished and the land sold and subdivided into building plots.
According to Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, writing for the Preservation Resource Center, only two remnants remain of “Robb’s mansion and the college that later occupied it: granite steps at 1230 Washington Ave., which were once the main gated entrance to the compound, and the circa-1902 Newcomb Pottery Building at Camp and Conery, now a residence.”
