Remembering Harold Sayre and Wesley College

For all my readers in Grand Forks or Fargo, please consider joining us  at 11 AM on Thursday May 3, 2018, in front of Sayre Hall on campus, for a small ceremony to recognize the sacrifice of Harold Holden Sayre. Sayre was killed in 1918 at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel and in 1919, Sayre Hall was renamed in his memory. The Wesley College buildings on the UND campus will be razed this summer.

The event will be and should run for about a half an hour. We’ve set up a Facebook event page. Do let us know if you plan to attend so we can make sure to have enough seating!

It will bring together representatives from the Grand Forks Air Force Base (Sayre was in the Army Air Service), the city of Grand Forks, the Wesleyan community, and the university with brief remarks from various individuals and a bit of music. 

This event is part of the Wesley College Documentation Project which is a collaboration between the history department at UND, UND Facilities, and the UND Honors. Honors students have spent hours this semester documenting the Wesley College buildings and digging through UND’s Special Collections at the Chester Fritz library to understand the unique history of the four Wesley College buildings and their donors.

Readers of this blog are likely aware that I’ve been producing fairly regular reports on our work in the Wesley College buildings. I’ve also produced a collection of letters from Wesley College president emeritus, Edward Robertson, written in 1935 amid a financial crisis at the college. You can download those here. Finally, I’ve put together this little two-page brief on Harold Sayre and Wesley College. You can download that here.